So, tail holes. As in the kind that clothes have for putting one's tail through. The concept is simple enough but it's always come with the question of how, exactly, the tail gets through them without being super uncomfortable. One common answer is for it to not be a hole, as such, but a second fly that has a button but no zipper. Which works for pants and skirts. For bikini bottoms, it can be as simple as having yet another place where the string is long enough to tie up (as I've already depicted once).

Well, today I think I figured out how it would work for underwear. This is going to sound really obvious in hindsight but I've never seen anyone draw it before. Just use the same type of clasp that's on bras! This even works for men's underpants because there are already bras with wide bands and multiple clasps (in fact, mysteriously, an image search for "bra clasp" just now turned out almost nothing but).

Yes I know there are people who don't have to think about any of this because they draw the tail coming out of the small of the back, above the whole waistband. Those people are wrong, I'll have you know. That's not how spines work! *shakes fist*

...Walt Disney's Robin Hood was released in US theaters. Directed by Wolfgang "Woolie" Reitherman and with character design and animation headed up by Milt Kahl, the film wasn't hailed as anything remarkable at the time, but it marked a turning point not just for the studio—it was the first animated film they made without any involvement from their late founder—but for western animation in general. Up until then, "funny animal cartoons" were synonymous with the sorts of rubbery, exaggerated character designs seen in things like Looney Tunes shorts or low-budget TV cartoons or older Disney films like Song of the South. Even Robin Hood's own concept art, courtesy of Ken Anderson, was leaning in this direction. But Kahl instead insisted on giving it the full Feature Animation treatment, taking the efforts they had been making since Bambi to render animals accurately and adapting them for the first time to their bipedal critters. To quote blogger Foxx Nolte:

"...Milt fought to push Robin in an older, more handsome direction - with a thicker neck, less pointed nose, and more mature body language. Milt also went to great lengths to retain the sense of an anatomy of a real fox, which he was relatively alone in the production for insisting on...

"Equally brilliant although less frequently seen onscreen is Kahl's Maid Marian. A worthy companion of Kahl's other great leading lady - Lady of Lady and the Tramp - Marian manages to be vivacious and romantic despite remaining 80% covered in a ludicrous outfit the entire run time (if you think it's easy to draw over-dressed characters, try it sometime). ... Despite being a floating face and hands inside a dress, Marian has the screen presence of a star. Robin's festive reds and greens contrast and compliment Marian's oranges, pinks and purples. The two have real screen chemistry and are the two most accomplished and interesting character designs to hail from the animation unit in the 70s."

Equally interesting is how little any of it affected the storytelling. While the angle of being cast with humanimals was repeatedly mined for sight gags—turtles ducking inside their shells, a snake being stuffed into an ale barrel through the hole, a fox disguising himself as a stork using stilts—the overall story is still just an adaptation of the Robin Hood legend that, in its broad strokes, could have been just as easily told with human actors on a soundstage. This, too, had never been attempted in a high-budget production. If you wanted to tell a story with animals, conventional wisdom went, you had to have a reason. To an extent this is still true: look at the way Zootopia is ABOUT its premise of a world of intelligent animals at least as much as it's about its characters; it's treated as a high-concept hook the same way about half of Pixar's films treat their otherworldly settings. In Robin Hood, it's just the esthetic the artists decided to roll with.

And so it is perhaps no surprise that the film is considered a pivotal moment in the birth of the modern furry fandom. To quote Nolte again:

"It's the first time that humanistic animal characters were used in a dramatic situation without undermining its effect. Now, yes, I know, I've already characterized this film as low stakes and companionable, but at the very least we can say that we are concerned that Robin may not survive his leap into the moat in a way that we are not when, say, Goofy falls off a building. The animals of Robin Hood are both identifiably human and identifiably mortal. And they did set precedents... At that time Disney was still pretty much the only game in town and Robin Hood the only real example of a certain type of funny animal."

She goes on to discuss how the fandom itself partially grew out of a group of people who had moved to California and Florida to get jobs as Disney theme park mascots, and at this point I'm out of my depth so I'll just drop the link again and let you read it for yourself if you're interested.

So in closing, happy 50th birthday to the furry community, I guess.

...is when people show up cosplaying as clever non-furry characters. So far I've seen:

(1) The Spy from Team Fortress 2 wearing a paper cutout mask of some red panda (probably their real fursona)
(2) Sarah Palin
(3) Van Pelt, the hunter from Jumanji

And now, at this year's Furry Weekend Atlanta, people spotted a guy dressed as a giant cheese grater, a reference to [EXTREMELY REDACTED]. It's nice to know they haven't run out of ideas yet.

Just wanted an excuse to say that.

Funnily enough I've never even seen that movie.

...is that most of the time, the participants have no way of choosing their partners. Like, imagine a brothel, except there are no prostitutes; you're just paying to have sex with the other customers, and also you don't even get to decide who you're being paired up with. Like, at most, you can try to coordinate things before you all go in, but even then you might just get outbid.

It's freaking weird, right?

...would they be heart-shaped or star-shaped? I can't decide.

When you post your half of an art trade, linking to the other person's half—or, if it hasn't been posted yet, updating the description once it has. There have been several times lately where I saw something labeled as an art trade and was like, Huh, I wonder what the other artist drew in return and then I head to their gallery and I just... have no idea what to even look for. I suspect it's often not even on here, because so many people use some other site as their main site and then forget to crosspost like half the time.

I have almost no art trades in my gallery personally, but I just now went and updated a 15-year-old post with a cross-link for the heck of it.

How about that. Recently passed 1000 watchers too.

I didn't really have anything in mind to do to mark the occasion, but I also haven't drawn much of anything in a stupidly long time, so here's an idea. You're the ones who made these milestones possible, and you all follow me for your own reasons. You have your own ideas of what makes my gallery worth looking at. Which means you also have specific things you'd like to see more of. So let's hear it! What do you really like that I've been neglecting? Characters, styles, specific older pictures you want to link to and say "more stuff like this", whatever! I need excuses to draw more in general.

And if you have something even more specific in mind, I finally got around to filling out my commission page, at least to the best of this site's ability. (Why is there not a single art site that has a good built-in commission page format?) Drop me a PM if you're interested.

You know how there are programs that you can use to pose CGI people models for reference? Are there any that let you paint onto them? I've been thinking it would be handy for keeping the fur patterns on some of my characters consistent from one shot to the next as the camera angle and pose changes.

Apparently guess "a day or two" means "just over a week" for me. I operate on Valve Time™.

Over a year ago, I promised to come back and dump my entire backlog if certain conditions were met. Much to my surprise, they were, within less than a month. And yet, it's taken me this long to honor my promise. Why is that?

Well, at first it was just me procrastinating, like always. I also had a big trip coming up and wouldn't be able to upload anything for two weeks, and figured it was better to wait until that was over so there wouldn't be a gap. But then, in November, something huge happened. The #MeToo movement. Suddenly, the thing that had pushed me and many others to swear off this site in the first place was a hot-button issue. I'd feel like an asshole if I just waltzed back right in in the middle of that, especially if there was just going to be another blow-up and mass exodus.

But for the most part, the movement never spread to the furry fandom. And at this point, it seems to have mostly petered out. I'm not happy about that, but there's only so much one can do in a world that seems more and more on the brink of complete societal breakdown. Of the people who abandoned this site, some have already come back; others fled to Tumblr, a site there's no way in hell I'm supporting after they were caught trying to actively stifle conversations about Net neutrality; and others have just sort of dropped off the map entirely.

I bring all this up because I'm sure there are still some out there who will think less of me for not sticking to my guns and staying away. And that's fine! I applaud your ability to put your principles above everything else, and I sincerely hope that brings good things your way in the end.

Oh, and just in case anyone cares, I finally got around to setting up some folders. So now it's easy to track down specific submissions if you're interested in that sort of thing. I couldn't really think of any use for them beyond sorting everything by what characters are in them; let me know if you have any ideas.

All of them. Retroactively. On the entire site. Without letting anybody know. So now my submissions, and virtually everyone else's, look like garbage. Oh, and their "support" section is literally a broken link now, so no chance of grabbing the ear of anyone in charge. Both of these are recent developments, I think just since Wix (a company I, as a Web designer, already despise) bought them out.

Funny how the rest of the Internet has made this train wreck of a site look better and better by comparison all the time. Sure, nobody knows how the code works anymore, so the site will always be stuck in 2006, but at least nothing is being actively made worse. Sure, the admins have dubious leadership qualities, but at least the owners haven't turned everything over to "algorithms" and there's still a functioning trouble ticket section.

And, yeah... at least they're not about to let the site get overrun by Nazis.

...So, about that. I did say I'd come back and upload all of my backlog if they got proactive about that, didn't I. Over a year ago. And if memory serves, it's also been over a year since they listened and did it.

But that's another story. One issue at a time. In fact, "one issue at a time" could be the title of that story. So tell you what, I'll follow up on that... in a day or two. After I've had time to cool down from this mess.

You remember those games, right? They were Epic's attempt at giving DOS a gaming mascot like how Nintendo had Mario and Sega had Sonic. Anyway, they just dropped on GOG.com. I've been kind of obsessed with them this past year, so this was a pleasant surprise to say the least.

Maybe if enough people buy them, Epic will think about bringing the character back. (In a stupid mobile game or Xbox One/Windows UWP exclusive, knowing them.)

Is this a beta feature? Like, you can post a 2000×2000 picture and it'll autoscale for people who are actually in the beta? Because the rest of us don't really appreciate these pictures that are locked to a resolution larger than our entire monitors (on desktop) or make the comments unreadably tiny (on mobile).

Just found out—through Twitter—that October 1 was International Raccoon Appreciation Day. This is the third time I've found out there was a day for a specific animal and I'd just missed it. First was Hyena Day, on April 27, and then Red Panda Day... like a month ago or something. UGH.

Is there, like, a calendar of these things so I can be prepared next year? If nothing else, there ought to be an article on WikiFur or something.

I know that there's a growing infestation of alt-right and alt-right defenders in this fandom, as with all geek circles, so I feel morally obligated to make it clear: such people are not welcome among my followers on this or any other website. If you have a problem with that, unwatch me NOW. If you argue with this position in any way, you will be blocked. I was going to say you'd be blocked and put on a list, but I won't need a list; your comment here will be enough to remind me who's who.

And Dragoneer, if this reaches you: I've got my eye on you. I know you've not shied away from treating your position as the head admin on this site as a way to "ban people from the fandom" for saying and doing things off-site that you feel gives furries a bad name, like that couple who appeared on that talk show. I daresay that support or defense of white supremacist groups is as bad a name as one can get. Let's see where your priorities lie. I realize this probably isn't going to mean much coming from someone who effectively skipped town years ago, so let me offer this as a concession: If you actually commit to doing your part to rid the fandom of this fascist scourge, I will officially bury the hatchet. I will return, permanently, repost everything I've posted elsewhere since my departure, and cease all further bitchery towards you and your administration. Because this is bigger than any of that. This is the future of western civilization we're talking about.

It's been eight years now since I created Klee Shay, the character in my current avatar. The idea at the time was that she was a mashup of all the character-design elements I felt were overused, or at least as many as I could cram into the same character without it getting completely ridiculous. But a lot has changed since then. Or so I would assume. I haven't been keeping up with the times very well, not helped by spending so much time away from this site, so I'm really not clear on what I've missed.

So help me out here. What trends have you seen come and/or go lately? I don't want to make any fundamental changes—she's still going to be a blue klee kai with pink hair and those little anime floaty wings (is there a word for those, by the way? I figure there must be some Japanese word that anime nerds use to refer to them), but everything else is open to being reimagined. Especially her outfit, which I wasn't especially confident about in the first place.

So I'm just fucking done with Firefox. At this point it's more unstable and unusable than Internet Explorer has ever been even at its worst, and the crew have made it pretty plain that their approach is to stick their fingers in their ears and pretend there's nothing wrong. I should not have to restart the goddamn thing every few hours because it just straight-up stops responding after an arbitrary amount of time.

But Google is evil and wants to take over the world, and Chrome is still designed for people who only use their browser to go to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and do so by typing "facebook" and "twitter" and "youtube" into the search bar because duh, what's a Web address? and is just generally missing a lot of things I'd consider to be basic functions of a Web browser in this day and age. Opera looks OK, but there seems to be no way to import my history and bookmarks into it, and I kind of rely on that stuff being available. Specifically, I'd want something I can literally just dump my profile into MozBackup from and load back up wholesale. So that means an actual Firefox fork.

The bad thing about open source software is that the sort of people who make it have a tendency to be arrogant toward their end users and basically be like, "If you want it to have such-and-such an improvement, code it yourself, whydon'tcha?" But the good thing is that there's almost always someone somewhere who'll take them up on that challenge, which is where we get forks. So what I'm asking here is, are there any forks of Firefox — preferably ones that are compatible with MozBackup and possibly even Firefox Sync — that are focused on maintaining the stability that Firefox has long since lost?

Not every for-profit entity is evil. But a not-for-profit entity turning into a for-profit entity can only mean getting worse for the people it was created to serve. Especially if it's not disclosed HOW they plan to make it profitable (if Dragoneer is to be believed ... feel free to laugh here ... the site has been a money sink and he's had to make up the difference out of his own pocket multiple times ... I suspect IMVU didn't know that when they signed up for this). If it's something as simple as adding DeviantArt-style premium accounts, then that's fine. If they plan to plaster the site with even more advertising than it already has (and more than DA currently has as well), I'm less cool with that.

My biggest concern, though, is option #3: Some sort of data mining scheme that will be kept secret from users, at least until it's too late and we're all getting Bad Dragon catalogs in the mail or something. Something that would expose things to people we know that we didn't want them to know about us. Don't believe me? People have been accidentally outed as gay or transsexual by targeted advertising and mass mailings in the past.

Dragoneer has personally instituted data mining before — remember that thing that would keep track of the outgoing links people clicked on? I think he said he discontinued it because it wasn't making money. God only knows what it would take for this site to actually make enough of a profit to make a corporate buyout worth it... but remember the old adage: "If you're not the (paying) customer, you're the product."

I'm not saying you should be paranoid and preemptively quit, moving to a site that was crowdfunded and run as a labor of love, ensuring our safety while sending a message to corporate suits who seek to turn us into a product, but ... oh no wait that's exactly what I'm saying, silly me. :P

And hey, if any of you are already in the process of doing that, as enough people already are that they've posted a front page news article welcoming them, don't forget to follow me.

First off, you might have noticed that I haven't posted anything here since I joined Weasyl. More likely you haven't, because you have a buttload of other people that you're watching and it's hard to be conspicuously absent from a crowd that big. Either way, you know now. On a related note, this year is already my most productive year since 2010 and you should totally check out my still-active sites if you haven't already. There may be a handful of never-before-seen strips from a certain webcomic in there; just saying...

With that out of the way, I have a pretty significant anniversary coming up: I managed, somehow (it was like a year ago or more), to hunt down the forum thread from in which I first posted a drawing of the character I grudgingly call my fursona, Steve Civett. (That'd be the guy in the middle here. I know, I practically never draw him ever because he's pretty much just me in animal-people form and that's boring. But he was also the first furry I ever posted on the Interwebs.) The post was dated October 22, 2004, so he'll be turning ten years old very soon, and I want to do something special to mark the occasion.

And boy, do I wish I had a clue what that should be.

So I figured I'd open the floor up to the peanut gallery and see if you had any ideas. No idea is too crazy, although obviously I'm only going to do one picture and you'll never know why I didn't pick the others so maybe it was because some of them were too crazy as far as you know. I AM A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY INSIDE A LIGHT FLAKY CRUST HEY LOOK OVER THERE

There was a time when I would happily sign up on just about any old site if it meant more exposure. I was on SheezyArt back when that was still relevant, I joined ArtSpots not long after it launched, and I even posted on the VCL for a while before I promptly forgot it existed because so did everybody else on earth. Hell, I signed up here back when it still seemed like it was going to be little more than a porn site, figuring I may as well branch out.

More recently, there hasn't been much incentive to keep that up. All the sites that sprang up since seemed likely to be flashes in the pan that weren't going anywhere, new accounts tended to be abandoned after about a week of activity, and there was clearly too much fragmentation among where people preferred to go. But that all changed when the fire nation attacked this past week, with roughly half the active posters I'm watching having declared an intent to post regularly on Weasyl. (I don't think I have to explain why. Everyone already knows what's up at this point.) So, I have now set up shop there as well. Follow me there, if you're so inclined, or make a note in case you change your mind. Apologies if you joined way back when this mess started and I've been keeping you waiting. </wishfulthinking>

As websites go, it certainly still needs work. The thumbnail system is a joke, though they have said they're working on improving it, and I'm not a fan of the userpage layout. But, wow, I'd forgotten what a rush it is to be in a new place for the first time. Revisiting my old pieces and the comments they elicited, browsing through the homepage gallery, discovering and following artists I've never seen before, being discovered and followed by people I've never seen before, it's like 2006 all over again. It's really rekindled my interest in producing more material and hopefully the feeling doesn't fade too quickly.

Dust: an Elysian Tail is currently on sale on Steam for $3.74. If you haven't heard of it, it was developed by former Jazz Jackrabbit artist Dean Dodrill, whom some of you might remember from when Yerf was still around. Yep, the guy's an old-school furry. Once upon a time, he was working on making a feature-length animated film, and this game was meant to be a sort of tie-in with the world he'd created for it. He wound up spending the next three years working on the game instead, finally releasing it on Xbox Live Arcade last summer and on Steam this past spring. Currently it's available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

So, what is it? It's a 2D action RPG with Castlevania-style level design (complete with grid-based area maps) and combo-based hack-'n'-slash combat. If that seems a bit intimidating, don't worry — there are only a few combos and special moves to learn, and the game gives you plenty of time to get used to them before throwing you up against enemies that can't be beaten with simple button mashing. Assisting you is a little flying sidekick named Fidget who serves as both your ranged weapon/game-breaking special attacks and comic relief. And everything is hand-drawn, and it is gorgeous. It's basically what AAA games would look like if polygon-based 3D had never taken over, or what indie games would look like if the world hadn't gone gaga over the faux 8-bit look.

You can get the game here. If you're not convinced yet, TotalBiscuit did a first-look of the Windows port here and you can watch Strippin of the Yogscast play through the first whatever-so-much of the game starting here in lieu of an official demo. It goes through most of the mini-tutorial segments, so you get a good idea of what you're in for gameplay-wise. I haven't actually finished it myself yet (I'm maybe halfway through?) but it's one of only a few games I've gotten in the last year that's managed to hold my interest past the first few hours, so take that as a rare recommendation.

I've seen a number of furries who have hipster-ironic fursonas... I wonder if anyone has one that's living roadkill. There are roadkill plushes out there, so I'd be a little disappointed if it hasn't been done yet.

Some people dream about visiting distant worlds... I dream about seeing pictures on a website. That's my brain in a nutshell.

...is that the IE7 compatibility could have been fixed with one line of code that most developers would have put in anyway without even thinking about it. The line, for anyone who's curious, is "z-index: 1" — the code that's used to specify that an object is a layer above the rest of the page. That the menu works in any browser without it is pretty much a fluke; I don't think default layering is even part of the W3C spec.

(The second saddest thing, for the record, is that it uses <table> tags to keep the two halves aligned to the left and the right respectively, instead of <div>s set to "float: left" and "float: right".)

Is mentioning when TV shows make references to furries still a thing? Because I just now saw an episode of Psych that aired over a month ago and nobody seems to have noticed what happened in one scene.

Shawn and Gus, a pair of police consultants, paid a visit to the coroner (who's been established as a bit ... odd; I guess you have to be to have a job that involves sticking your hands inside dead people all the time) and asked him to pull up the autopsy reports on someone they think might be connected to the current case. He opens his laptop and... this was on the screen, accompanied by the sound of someone saying "Meow!"

He quickly switched over to the other window and nervously asked, "Did you see that?"

Gus: *bad liar face* No.
Shawn: Yes.

I don't think the scene is on YouTube, but those of you who have access to Hulu can see the episode here if you're quick (it "expires" and becomes limited to Hulu Plus subscribers only tomorrow).