So my colored sketch pages are pretty popular but I end up putting too much work into them for the price I offer. So I'm wondering about your guy's opinion.

Would you rather pay the same price for slightly less, 3-4 body images instead of 6.

Or would you rather pay slightly more for the same amount. Here's an example of what I'm talking about.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/20918227/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/19449474/

Doofing around online between commissions I came across a discussion about Wonder Woman and how she does not have Batman or Superman's oath not to kill. She'll kill people. Someone mentioned that her killing makes her weaker as a hero, the idea being that she's no longer a hero that is on the high road but now an antihero that merely kills for whatever she deems to be justice. Others noted that it is cowardly and an easy way out.

What do you guys think? Keeping purely in the realm of comics rather than real life killing situations. Assuming someone is super human, with super abilities, does it lessen their character to kill?

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My personal opinion is it depends on how it's written, but it can make for a stronger character. I think you could have a character that wants to avoid killing and avoids it, but ultimately can see why it is the only option, and honestly I think that character would be (in terms of character strength) better than batman.

I know, that's a shocking allegation. Maybe downright absurd, but bear with me. Batman is the token of justice. He has the conviction not to kill. Various reasons for this has been written, whatever. Here's the thing. In the realm of Gotham you have characters like the joker. Joker is not going to stay in Arkham, and will get out and do crazy nasty shit for the sake of it. Now yes his breaking out is because you gotta sell comics and the reoccurring villain will sell, but from the point of view of Batman, he just knows Joker doesn't stay in Arkham.

So now, Batman is an individual who is aware of an imminent threat to the city, a very serious threat. He has the ability to stop it completely, and due to his conviction doesn't.
Now there's other theoretical options. He could lock Joker in a box, encase it in cement and bury it, but with those sorts of options it's rather worse than a death sentence, so it's not really in the favor of (Batman is a hero).

But without the conviction, Batman isn't Batman. So I guess there's the kicker. I think you can write a hero that kills that is a better hero than Batman by giving them strong convictions and when faced with a problem like joker they choose the death of their self, their conviction which makes them, for the good of the city.

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Incidentally has anyone here read ENDGAME the Batman arc? My all time favorite arc ever. holy shit.

I'm alone in the house for 2 weeks, the cat is a terrible conversationalist, and I really miss teaching philosophy. So let's chat.

Bring up a philosophy subject and I'll talk to you about it. Ethics, metaphysics, Phil mind, Socrates, Plato, Kant, Hume, whatever. Even if you're not sure about a subject, or you just have a question or wanna know more, ask, I'll do my best to inform.

Heads up though. I studied primarily analytic, so my continental philosophers are not that great (Voltaire in particular.)
I do like existentialism though, especially Camus

Soooo yeah.

My car is dead. There's something wrong with the battery and I need to take it to the shop. I live in a rural area so access to food, or emergency help for the pets requires a car that works.

I'm offering some discounts. Animated icons for 20$, colored sketches for 10$, and I'm lowering the price of my flat color characters to 35$, cel shaded characters will be 50$

Please spread the word if you can. I need to be able to get this car fixed.

Edit: it's a problem with the alternator so I'm needing to make up 800

Edit 2: you guys are incredible and already helped with a little over half the cost! It's 380 left and the cost will have been made up!

I want to run a couple auctions but don't particularly want to use FA as not everyone uses it anymore, especially after the password thing. So I'm looking for any suggestions for a site not including Furbuy. I know about Furbuy and I'm looking for a possible alternative.

Yes I've tried it, it's awesome, and I decided I wanted to do commissions for it. Each one will be custom drawn.

It will feature:
Your fursona or human trainer persona, in any pokemon outfit that's been in a game (your choice on outfit) with Pokemon Go name
Your top pokemon (up to 6) with the CP and names.
The logo of your selected team in the background

Up to 3 achievement badges if you would like.

I'll have a demo piece soon, these will either be flat color or shaded.

If this something you guys might be interested in? If so what sort of price range do you think you'd spend on a comm like this?

I was a little hobo child and bummed a trip to anthrocon off a scraggly coyote to whom I am eternally grateful. It was a blast of a time. I met new people, saw old friends, fursuited and so on and so forth. I'll have a full journal in the morning, but right now I'm super excited to be home after a 9 hour drive.

I got one. Look for Fayvfox.

Yep

The latest stir in the furry community regarding Dealer's Den selections has made me curious, so I made a form to get an idea of people's preferences.

http://goo.gl/forms/XeUegW0i4hzY27W93

Please respond and share if you like to deal at cons or are thinking of dealing at cons.

This is not official. It's not associated with any cons at all, what so ever. Please don't yell at me regarding selection processes that I have nothing to do with :(

I want to do a fun little project and I thought I'd get it started with a little game. It will all make sense later but for now name 1 animal you'd like to see in a hybrid (just one animal, one half of a hybrid pair) and then give a number 1-20 (No fractions or decimal points please, nor the symbol for pi. Yes you there thinking of this very clever way to write a number that exists between 1 and 20 but is not a simple traditional numeral. You are indeed clever, now please just write numeral between 1 and 20)

Civil war just came out and I loved it. It wasn't what I was expecting, or rather it wasn't all of what I was expecting, but I am okay with that.

It got me thinking more though, particularly the comparison for the huge success that is every Marvel Studios movie and the DC cineverse movies and their less success. Just looking at gross numbers, it's not the end of the weekend and it looks like Civil war is roughly half the total gross for Batman v Superman.

Comic book movies are going to be a thing for a long time to come, in part due to the early and notable success of the Marvel films. When it used to be the case that comic movies did about the same as an summer action blockbuster Marvel movies stepped up and DC movies do not seem to be doing as well.
Why do you dear readers think that is?

What do you think Marvel is doing right that other studios aren't quite grasping? Or if you like the DC movies more, why?

As a general note, please no spoilers especially on the more recent movies.
___________________________________________________________________________

Personally, I think Marvel studios outright is just tied into the genre better and respond to the audience better, I think this is why they do better than the average comic book movie.

What I mean is that, I think other companies treat CB (comic book) movies as simply movies of the action genre and so they use the basic meta structure for an action film. Every 10 minutes action happens, plot is formed in such and such a way and you insert such and such archetypes.

I don't think the metric is wrong for action movies, but rather doesn't quite fit this particular source material or subject. It's sort of like someone has an octagon peg and a round hole, you can make it fit, but it seems Marvel found the octagon hole. It's not just action and action archetypes, but they focus on character more than you see in other action movies. Focusing beyond just "bad thing happens, hero has reason to do good thing"

Take for instance Spiderman. (If you dunno the origins of spiderman by now spoiler I guess.) We've seen the origin so many times at this point and generally what you get so far as spiderman's motivation is Uncle Ben dies, with great power comes great responsibility, fight crime.
It's not wrong, that's a motivation that makes sense, but in contrast in Marvel movies i've seen a character casually discuss the moral status of inaction. It goes beyond just having power, but the idea that the character believes that if you can do something and dont you are morally responsible. That is more complex than you'd seen generally before Marvel studios started making the marvel cineverse movies and in many ways it is subtle.

Avengers is my favorite movie of the Marvel ones for this reason alone, the characters are more than just different powers wrapped in spandex, they each have their own motivations, their own demons, and how those are expressed are very organic rather than formulaic.

The way Marvel writes strikes me as a cross between an action movie, a book movie, and contemporary movie. Our uncertainty in the world is reflected. The fears of terrorism. The fears of established government, all of that is addressed.
Honestly, I think Marvel is doing so damn well because they did what other studios didn't. It's a small difference but instead of taking a comic book and making it a movie, they took movies and made them like comic books.

We get story arcs, characters to follow, our hopes and fears are represented in the stories and at the end of the day you can feel better because Captain America punched Hitler, or Iron Man beat the terrorists. It gets us used to the heroes and then tackles some big issues.

On the other hand I think DC did the opposite. Honestly I think the Justice League franchise started with a blunder in and off itself. They wanted to make the movies gritty. I get that, I do. I like gritty hero stories. That's why I like Watchmen, but it does take some balance. You can't throw a shit ton of grime on a superman movie and say "that should do it." DC always had a balance, Batman vs superman, dark vs light. They make incredible foils, but if you have a gritty superman because grit sells the rest of your universe is just going to be so dark you'll want to adjust your gamma settings.

To be honest I all but lost interest in DC universe. I can't get hyped about the trailers because rather than see a glimpse of character, some depth, it's just action action character archetype, and honestly it seems that's already the better parts of the movies.

I won't go so far to say they're bad. If you like them, reader, awesome! To me however it just feels like octagon is a round hole, it mostly fits, it kinda works, but I feel like it can easily all be done so much better.

I last exams complete, final grades submitted.

I am no longer a college professor.

I'm kinda gonna miss it, but i'm looking forward to what comes next.

So the random number generator has chosen and this months winner for the Watcher Appreciation Art is

I loved this, and honestly I think it did bring out more conversation and such, so I'll be doing watcher appreciation art for May as well.

To take part you just have to be a watcher for me, and you just need to comment on work that I post in May. At the end of the month a winner is chosen at random for a free simple flat color commission.

I've been away a bit, finals time is crazy hectic for profs as well as we finish up the lectures and prep for incoming grading hellstorms. I have something to the tune of 50 exams and 50 final papers to grade in less than a week coming up :(

So, to all of you that are in college and preparing for tests. Good luck, you will survive this.

Also from a prof side general words of advice.

If you need help, ask for help, but don't expect a miracle.

If you send me an email the night before a paper is due, that you've had over a month to work on, and ask a basic question, then I'm going to just assume you didn't start till an hour ago, and at that point there's not a lot of useful advice to give.

Professors are humans too, we sleep sometimes.

I swear to god I've gotten emails at 3am for papers due at 9am, asking for substantial help, or a review and comments and it's like "n-no...why student..."

Also! Look up your final policies, make sure that if you have too many in a day you reschedule (early). Don't be the asshole that emails the day of the final asking for make up time because you didn't pay attention until the last moment.
Double douchebag points if it's thurs or friday of finals week.

It's rough draft day which means I just sit while people read each other's papers and help correct them.

So ask me questions about literally anything and I shall do my best to answer.
Or just ask me about general subjects and I'll tell you whatever random trivia I know.

When you dream what do you dream about? Is it first person, are you taking part in a world, is it in color, in black and white? Can you feel texture? Is it perhaps a third person dream, like watching a movie play out?

I'm curious to hear about people's experiences.

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Me personally, I have two types of dreams really. Hyper realistic ones or third person ones.

The hyper realistic ones, I call them that because they are to me indistinguishable from reality. Physics works the way it always works. Even when I have flying dreams it's something where I have wings and must concentrate on flapping the wings properly.

I don't tend to like these ones, they get combined into night terrors often. Something happens and I have to work backwards to see if it happened to me or not. I've been told you can't read in dreams, I can. You can't read time (time passes as it should. I've looked at clocks in dreams and they tick and tock and move as they are meant to) etc etc.
There are some benefits. When I touch rusted metal I can remember the texture with clarity. What it feels like to dip my feet in water, etc.

The other more common type of dream I call 3rd person. It's like watching a movie happening around you. I'm not interacting with anything, I'm not involved. I can't interact with things. I, Fay, am not there at all.
I love these ones, some of the best stories and characters I've written come from these dreams, which almost feels like cheating cause to me it just feels like writing down something I watched.
I've never really heard anyone else having these types of dreams though, so i'm curious if it happens to other people.

By the by my dreams are always in color, unless it's genre specific for one of he story ones (I had a funny poke at the detective genre dream the other day in black and white)

As always I'm curious about people's interest and reactions to things, so I wanted to ask something in regards to people's reading habits. No judgment, I have no dog in this, I am genuinely curious about how people react to certain types of material and why.

In my experience, people tend to naturally scorn media (shows, movies, books) that present a message that is antithetical to their own ideas.

For instance, I personally have a great distaste for 50 Shades of Grey. Even with the movie, my roommates were watching it for a class and after 30 minutes I was so uncomfortable I had to leave the room and stop watching.

It's a pretty simple and reasonable reaction overall. If you don't like something, you don't watch it/read it, (before anyone mentions, this isn't about people demanding censorship or trying to force views on others. This is about individuals choosing for themselves what not to read or watch).
It's pretty common that people dislike racism or sexism and don't want to watch or read that sort of thing.

Now here's the question part. The past is rife with racist and sexist views, and the work of the time would naturally reflect that in some way, (Jim Crows in Dumbo, Doyle uses the term "Street arabs" for homeless kids, etc.)

If you avoid a work for racism, do you take classic works as a product of their time? Does that make the imagery or slurs less biting? Is it the same to you and thus you prefer to avoid reading them for that reason? Is it still unpleasant but the literary value of the work makes up for it where as works like 50 Shades of Grey can't?

How do you as a reader approach the racism or sexism in older works?

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For me personally, I accept works as a product of their time for the most part. Time soothes the bite and sting. Older works don't bother me in the same way newer ones do, or perhaps I see some value in it that the newer ones don't have.

I haven't really come across a book recently that's really racist but makes a compelling literary point worth reading.

I'm thinking of doing a silly comic story thing for practice and was curious what story people would want to hear. So these are my options thus far. Tell me which one you want to see in comic form MOST

1. The time I thought a guy was missing a leg for like an hour (there was a fake leg involved)

2. The time Deo took me to a Satanist party in Detroit

3. The time Deo armed me with a butter knife so I could defend myself at Anthrocon

4. The time that I thought I was being followed by another car late in the evening.

5. Write in option (if you'd rather hear something about grad school, another topic, or if you know another one of my stories that you want to see in comic form?)

I've been enjoying getting back into art again and the community. gave me the idea to do watcher appreciation art.

So for the month of April, everyone that's a watcher of mine that comments on art will be in the running for a free flat color commission at the end of the month.

I prefer comments to favs because I would like to start interacting more with the community again. I appreciate favs, no doubt, but there's not a lot of interaction from it.
I'm hoping this works out, I'll keep track of people via my trello.

I've been contemplating joining the registry for Bone Marrow Donation. Meaning that I would donate bone marrow if someone were to need it.

In talking about this people have had some interesting reactions, though mostly D: but it's a giant needle"

So I'm curious watchers, what do you think? would you do it? Would you donate bone marrow?

This isn't to make people feel like shit or anything if not. There's no obligation to donate body stuff at all. It doesn't make anyone less to do it, and honestly I don't see it as that much of a big deal to think someone is better for doing it, or much better than sharing time and effort really. So if you wouldn't do it that's totally cool, i'm just curious as to why.

It's movie day for my class, and while GATTACA is a great movie, I've watched so many times already, so ask me anything.

Any personal questions, suit questions, questions about philosophy, literature, request a story from my life whatever. Shoot


And since I'm extra bored anyone that asks a question is in the running for a free sketch of their character, randomly selected.

I wanted to warn everyone I'm raising my prices on sketch pages. for multiple images plus color it was just too much work for the cost.

I'll be raising the price to 35$ per page for colored pages (that means at least 5 colored images) or $25 for no color

This change does not effect anyone with a current commission.

I am opening up for commissions to be completed in 24 hours. Send a note or reply here if interested. Prices are as follows

Sketch: $10
Sketch page: $25
Flat color: $40
Shaded: $60

Limited slots available

To give everyone a better idea of the site and what it will look like and all that, I have a link to the site as it sits now.

I still have a lot of work formatting and improving the visuals. I also just have a shit ton of pages to work on and just make the info for, but for now this is the product of the weekend.

Check it out, send me feedback etc. If there's something you'd like to see covered I would love to hear it.

http://thefursuitguide.webs.com/

I have mentioned my ongoing guide project. It's developed into a full blown website set up to store the guide info as well as link to various tutorials and such.

The site itself is non-profit and not designed to promote any particular builder. As such I'm looking for some pictures of fursuits to use as examples as well as just help make the site look better. I don't want it to be OFA only.

if you're interested in allowing my to use a picture of your fursuit please reply here or send a note. Credit will be given for both the suit and the builder of the suit itself under each picture. If you have questions reply or note. I am more than happy to explain what I'm doing and what I need pictures of specifically.

I definitely need some pics of partials, 3/4 suits, and quads if you know anyone. I also need some for style examples.