Lately I've gotten pretty sick of instant messaging, in general. First off, I've been getting the occasional message that I know is spam, which is just making me wary of every message I get from someone I don't know. Every time I get one, I think back to that spambot from a few years back that would message two random people under the guise of each other, so if you respond you get trapped in a conversation with a total stranger who thinks you messaged him first. I have no idea if they ever figured out a way to stop those, but even if they did, I don't like talking with people who I have no idea who they are and, for all I know, just found me by randomly looking through the Yahoo directory.

The fact that they just post "hi" and expect me to start an actual conversation from there isn't helping either. I feel like there need to be some ground rules, some netiquette, if you will, for sending an instant message to someone for the first time. You wouldn't call someone on the phone and not say who you are as soon as they answer, especially if it's someone who wouldn't recognize you from your caller ID. I think the responsibility should be on the "caller" to start up a conversation before the recipient is expected to say anything.

Systems where you have to confirm a mutual friend status before either person can message the other are actually even worse, because then I just get friend requests from total strangers with no way to talk to them to find out who they are. So I'd have to confirm their request up front anyway, so why even bother asking?

It's funny. I used to think that SMS was just a scam to get people to pay extra for something anyone with an Internet-enabled phone could do for free. But now I'm starting to see why people might prefer it to getting a phone with an IM client.

I know a lot of people do these — commissions based around a specific theme, for a lower price than their usual fare. And since I am suddenly both wanting to do something art-wise and creatively bankrupt, I'm wondering if anyone might be interested in me doing something like that. There are two themes I have in mind:

#1: I was a little disappointed when nobody ended up filling out my caught-by-animal-control-officer-Cheyenne meme, but would anyone be interested in paying me to do it for you? Your character doesn't have to actually fit in the net, of course; they can just be standing next to her, leashed and reacting however you think they would react to getting caught by her. I'd include the same background as my original entry. Basically it'd be a two-character-plus-background shot for the same price as (or slightly less than) a single-character-with-no-background piece, because half the work's already done.

#2: I've been digging the "sexy Portal turret" costumes (as seen here and here), and I'm curious if any Portal fans would like to see their character in one. This is another case where I could include a background for free, since I can just take a screenshot from the game with the HUD and portal gun invisible and paste the character on top of it, although I'd be limited to the resolution of my monitor in that case.

In fact, if anyone really wanted me to get fancy, I know my way around the level editor and might even be able to whip up a custom map to take the screenshot in. It'd cost extra, but I could probably do it.

Either of these sound intriguing to anyone out there? Let me know in the comments.

This. Changes. EVERYTHING.

Seriously, this is going to get me to completely retool the way I do shading. *squee*

Oh, and that "smoother brushes" thing I discovered when I had the demo turned out to be real; it's got a stabilizer option like SAI has. Just discovered it. It's on by default. (Which only makes it more confusing that they can't give Flash a decent brush smoothing feature, but ... eh. Baby steps.)

Several months ago, people have been creating vector traces of frames from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. I've been taking some of these vectors and turning them into shirt designs every so often, but my posts on Ponychan haven't yielded the sort of feedback I've been hoping for—namely, critique and suggestions on how to improve the designs I don't think are quite ready for prime time.

Specifically, here's what I'd like to find out:

"We All Have Our Dark Side" — This is the first one I came up with, and I think it shows. The basic concept seems solid enough, but part of me is jumping up and down saying it needs a better font. I've got a huge inventory of fonts to pick from, but I can't find anything that I like better. Ideas? Any typography geeks care to weigh in?

"Confound These Ponies" — I'd like to come up with something more interesting to use for the encircling inner text than the same line repeated over and over, but I'm not sure what. There's an alternate version that uses Pinkie Pie's long-winded speech at the party, but I'm not sure that works all that well for a shirt design. Maybe if I made the text even smaller and/or fainter?

"Ceci n'est pas un poulet" — This is one where I came up with the idea first and then tried to find an image to go with it. Can anyone recommend one that would be more suitable? I was thinking maybe a confused expression like this, but I dunno.

Legal disclaimer (because I know all of the comments will be about this if I don't bring it up): There's pretty much no way to get a license to sell these "legitimately", so I plan to just put up a Spreadshirt storefront and sell them at cost. I like the basic designs well enough to want to share them with the world. So far there have been many unauthorized online Pony-shirt stores and none of them have been taken down yet, so I figure it's like the YouTube videos and Hasbro couldn't care less. I have also been getting permission from the people who vectored the images and plan to credit them directly.

Could you please supply me with the name and contact information of whoever came up with the bright idea that holding down Ctrl always should switch to the Move tool? As well as whatever focus group found all those users who were whining that hitting V, moving the layer, then the key for whatever tool they were just working on was toooo muuuuch worrrrk.

I especially like that there's no way to disable this "feature." And that it uses the same key I have to hold down to zoom in and out, toggle between vertical and horizontal scrolling, and undo, so I end up accidentally shifting entire layers a few pixels one way or another without noticing until I zoom all the way out and look at the finished product.

Anyway, if you could send me all of their home addresses, that'd be great. I want to send them a, um, gift basket. You know, to let them know how much I appreciate the work they put into this fine product.

P.S. If you could send the address of the person who designed Flash MX's brush tool too, I'd really appreciate it.

I've been thinking of using Spreadshirt to sell some shirt designs of mine, but I want to make sure I understand how to get the best quality results out of it before I make anything public. If anyone has bought a light-colored shirt with a PNG design on it at some point and can give me some idea of the print quality, I'd really appreciate some info. Particularly I'm wondering about transparent PNGs printed on light-colored (not white) shirts. Are the colors true, or are they tinted the color of the fabric like the ones CafePress and Zazzle make? Are the edges crisp, or are they fuzzy from the antialiasing?

And if anyone has set up a store on there, I'm wondering if they really took out the ability to upload vector designs. I know I can't upload any to the "make your own shirt" tool, but I haven't set up a store yet, and I was thinking maybe that feature is restricted to stores. Because I know it used to be an option.

No, this isn't about re-tagging pirated MP3s. I'm talking about original songs people upload to the Web. My MP3 player expects every track to have an artist and an album associated with it, and there's rarely an album and, in some cases, not really an artist name either unless you count their YouTube screenname.

I figure I'm not the only one who has a few such tracks and wants to take them with me when I'm on the go, as 'twere, so what approach do you all use?

Well, first let me go on record as saying I've always found those "couples icons" to be kind of annoying, especially when they're composited poorly so there's no good way to split them up and still have them look any good alone (and they're going to be alone 99% of the time, since that's what icons are for).

But given the sudden rise of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic screenshot icons on here, I thought about the idea of cropping that one frame from "Winter Wrap-Up" into a pair of couple icons.

And then I decided to just do it myself: [1] [2] They... sort of work OK on their own. Better than most I've seen.

I guess if anyone out there knows two bronies who are in a relationship and might want to use these, pass the word on to them so they can call dibs. I think it would be kind of awkward if more than one couple were to use them.

It seems I missed my ... uh, the day five years after I joined this site. "FAnniversary"? Seriously, I had planned to do something to commemorate and then it just kind of sneaked up on me.




...


*party horn sound*

Credit for this discovery goes to various regulars on the Comics Curmudgeon. The current team behind the long-running newspaper comic (and popular snark bait in some Internet circles) Dick Tracy are both retiring later this year. [link] And guess who the new writer is going to be: None other than Mike Curtis, the creator of Shanda the Panda and founder of Shanda Fantasy Arts.

So to sum it up: A mainstream cartooning book legend is writing a book on how to draw furries, and the creator of a well-known furry comic is taking over writing a famous comic strip. The world has officially gone criss-crossed.

Let us reflect on what this holiday is really about. Mugs of hot jones (optionally spiked with Listerine), a superhero who flies around in a painted-over baloney sandwich van delivering blank DVD-Rs, and trapping your little brother in a boarded-up bathtub in the middle of a snowy field.

Is it any wonder this is my favorite time of year? :)

I've been looking for an excuse to clear that last journal off my page, but this wasn't what I had in mind...

Chris Hart is publishing a how-to-draw-furries book.

If you don't know who this guy is, he used to be the king of cartooning books. Drew all his own demonstrations, made the process easy to follow but easy to adapt to other poses and original characters, and had an appealing style that budding artists like myself wanted to imitate. (Which is pretty much how you market a how-to-draw book.)

That ... thing on the cover looks nothing like his art. Which does not surprise me at all, because he's been either outsourcing the artwork in his books or doing an atrocious job of aping other art styles (I'm too lazy to find out which) for years now, ever since he started publishing books on how to draw "in the style of X" to appeal to all the budding devianTARDs out there who want to learn how to do fan art for That Show All the Cool Dids Are Talking About. *PTOOEY!*

I guess I'm going to have to hunt it down at the library once it comes out and see for myself how badly this turns out, just out of morbid curiosity. In the meantime, though, I can still highly recommend his earlier books, particularly (if you're interested in learning to draw furries) How to Draw Cartoon Animals, How to Draw Cartoon Dogs, Puppies and Wolves, and How to Draw Cartoon Cats, Kittens, Lions and Tigers. To this day, I would name him as my #1 artistic influence for both my cartoony and anthro styles, even though he's never done any anthro stuff himself (until, if we're really lucky, now).

So, remember that Team Fortress 2 mapping contest I told you about a while back? Well, the results are in.

No, I didn't win. In fact, I didn't even technically get my entry finished. Even if you ignore the fact that a combination of slow compile time, even slower upload and, oh yeah, my usual shameless procrastination prevented the "final" build from getting uploaded under the deadline, it really wasn't a "finished" map by any decent standards at that point. There were a few points where, even if I'd been given a whole extra month, I probably would have still given up trying to make look pretty and rush-jobbed it.

It sure was a learning experience though. Nothing like having to make a presentable, finished map to force a guy to learn every technique in the book, including one fundamental practice that Valve uses in all their maps but many mappers still aren't aware of. (One of which accounted for the ridiculously slow compile, actually.)

And it seems there is a consolation prize: My map was mentioned on the page where they announced the winners and non-winners. The page that got linked on the official TF2 blog. As the guy who saw his blurry visage in the background of a shot on the local news said, "I'm famous!" :P

...is, first of all, a mod staff big enough and committed enough to support my idea. Right now people are expected to deal problem users themselves because the staff doesn't have the resources to take care of it. So there needs to be a push to get to a point where they can be more hands-on.

But anyway, this is how I think it should go: First off, every comment has a little Report button on it that any registered user can click to report an abusive, spammy, or layout-breaking comment to a mod. But the second tier of this is that reporting a comment on your own submission or journal instantly hides it from view, replaced with a "This comment is hidden pending moderator action" message. The mod, then, can decide to either remove it (and possibly penalize the person who posted it) or unhide it and mark it as having been dealt with. Users attempting to remove the same comment more than once will themselves be penalized.

I am not criticizing the new feature we have now, mind you. What I'm suggesting is something the site's current codebase almost certainly does not support. Heck, the fact that we still don't have a plain-Jane Report button suggests it doesn't support that either. This is for integrating into any overhaul the site may get in the future.

Ayup. Seems his little feud with Dragoneer isn't over yet. This time he's trying to get back at him by threatening to sue for "copyright infringement" by hosting the many pieces he's commissioned in their creators' galleries. And in response... Dragoneer has caved and complied with his insane demand. I'm not sure who to rage at more, at this point.

This is what I got from an admin whose name has been removed to protect the innocent.

Due to recent threats made against Fur Affinity and Ferrox Art LLC. by one Mr. Allan Greenwald (aka Lupine Assassin), FA is being forced to remove images depicting Mr. Greenwald's character(s) from its website. We regret that we must take this action, but due to continued legal attacks by Mr. Greenwald, we are complying with his wishes that his intellectual content be removed from our website.

We apologize for having to take these actions. We do not agree with them, and feel that Mr. Greenwald is overstepping his legal bounds against the rights of artists. He has recently threatened action against Fur Affinity and its artists for displaying images of his character, or those which bear resemblances to his character.

In order to protect ourselves from costly (and time-consuming) legal trouble, we are forced to take proper measures, taking action to remove the pictures from our servers.

Once again, we apologize for having to take these actions.

Just thought you might like to know that Allan is still a colossal asshole.

...people try to come up with characters that look totally unique, and then pay someone else to insert them into nearly-identical cookie-cutter avatars.

I'm sure there's something profound about that, but it's almost 3 AM over here and I'm kind of stupid.

...I figured out how to get my tablet working again! Yes, while I may never know what actually went wrong, it turns out installing the official driver, restarting, and then UNinstalling the Tablet PC tools that came with Windows did the trick somehow.

Which is good because, when I tried creating a second account to migrate my stuff over to (which also would have dealt with the problem), I discovered that on that account, Windows doesn't know what a .txt file is! Oh Windows. Just when I think you've got your shit together, you develop some goofy new problem that makes no goddamned sense.

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean you'll be getting a flood of new posts. See, one of my other hobbies is creating maps (levels) for Team Fortress 2, and last month Valve announced a contest to take an unfinished map and make it into something pretty. I don't expect to win, but I am committed to plugging away at this so I can actually have something finished to submit before the deadline. Most other artistic endeavors will be reserved for the periods when I get creative block on that project.

Channel 8's news just had a thing about that Pittsburgh guy who tried to have his name legally changed to "Boomer the Dog". (It got shot down.) No mention of furries besides a casual mention that he attends Anthrocon; I guess they figured everyone already knows what that is by now.

They are growing bored with us...

So let me start off by saying I am not fond of Windows' way of dealing with USB ports. If I unplug a peripheral from one port and plug it into another, it's supposed to know it's the same device. Instead, it "detects" the device and tries to find and install the plug-and-play driver all over again. Stupid, but harmless, right?

Wrong. Thanks to this "feature" I no longer have a working tablet.

A couple weeks ago I moved my workstation downstairs because it's like a million degrees right now and we don't have air conditioning. I didn't bring my tablet with me because I figured this was only temporary and, besides, there wasn't really room. But the other day I had something I needed to use it for, so I brought it down and plugged it into the front USB port out of convenience. This caused the computer to freak out and try to hunt down the driver for the thing. After thinking it had found it, the tablet still did not work. So I plugged it in where I thought it had been plugged in before, in the back. It still did not work. So I tried restarting. No change.

At this point I am freaking out because God forbid this $200 piece of hardware is straight-up busted. (I would honestly not be surprised to find out something in it had melted.) But then it occurred to me, for some reason, to log in with the account I made for when my mother needs to borrow my computer. Sure enough, it worked. But this still does not solve my problem.

I figured somehow it had installed the driver on top of the old one and broken both, so I tried rolling back to last week with System Restore. Aside from giving me a major fright by turning my account into a plain white screen until after I had logged into the other one and out again (seriously, WTF), that did not change anything. So then I tried deliberately unplugging the tablet, uninstalling the driver manually, and plugging it back in. Nothing. Finally I resorted to downloading the official driver from Wacom's website. (I'd been using the built-in one this whole time because Wacom's driver was kind of wonky last time I tried it.) That didn't help either.

So now I'm pulling my hair out trying to get this damned thing working again without having to wipe my hard drive and reinstall everything, because that would now be the third time in less than a year and I am really, REALLY sick of doing it. Plus I am of the opinion that nobody should ever have to do that. It's like having to take the engine out of your car and then put it back in because the power steering went on the fritz.

http://kotaku.com/5581084/its-like-.....eam-fortress-2

(No, there's no prize for finding him; someone already posted a crop showing where he is.)

I'm honestly a bit shocked by the size of that crowd. It looks like there are as many people in there as go to Anthrocon, period! I think the rumors about there still being furries who don't own fursuits have been greatly exaggerated...

Just a thought... since furries (the characters, not the people) have holes or buttoned-up slits in the backs of their pants for their tails to go through, wouldn't that mean they'd never need belts to hold their pants up?

It's Portal.

That's right, from now until May 24, Portal, the most highly-acclaimed video game of 2007 and winner of all three of Penny Arcade's "We're Right Awards", is FREE. Which means, yes, for the love of all that is fun, GET IT.

"But I'm on a Mac." GREAT! They just ported the game to the Mac. And it's a native port, not some stupid emulation crap like most "Mac games".

"But my computer is old and can't run games." FINE! That's the beauty of Steam: once you're on record as having "bought" a game (even for free), you can re-download it for free on any computer you want, forever. So in other words, buy now, play later. ;)

"But I don't play video games." HOLD IT! This is not like other games. It's short. You don't shoot anything. You have to use your noodle. It is awesome. If there is a game for people who don't like gaming, this is it. Here's some perspective for you: I am right now creating an account for my parents so I can register them a copy. Neither of them plays video games, and my mom doesn't even use a computer.

I'm serious, guys. If anyone reading this doesn't go get Steam and download this game, I will be a very sad panda. You owe it to yourselves to check it out.

So yeah. I'm bored and lazy at the same time, so jack-all's getting done around here lately. I have... ideas... for things to draw, but I can't motivate myself to actually draw them because I'm so freaking out of practice that I keep sucking and erasing and starting over and getting frustrated.

And hey, it's almost the weekend again! Double the boredom and double the not-fun!

So here's what I'ma do. I'm going to open up the floor to your suggestions. Is there something you've always wanted to have me draw? Something you've always wanted to see my characters do? 'Cause I'm listening! I might not do it, but hey, it's worth a shot and I'm sort of burned out on ideas.

(Disclaimer: This is not a thread to request I draw your character. Firehazard reserves the right to deny any request for any reason without saying what that reason is. Your mileage may vary. Not a member of FDIC. This rock is not to be used as a floatation device. I'm on a horse.)

Or maybe it's an installation piece. Or both. Either way, somebody's bucking for a public grant.

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/furseiseki/

Meme yoinked from vinci_nicolaides. This should be interesting.

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What do you, as the audience, think that my art style says about me personally?

What type of feeling do you get from it, and what kind of feeling does that give you about me?

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There were more questions, aimed at people who had actually met me, but almost nobody has, so I'm leaving them off.