I had been using the trial of CS4, and now that I've switched back to my own CS2 I've found that the tablet input is actually more clunky and wobbly. I didn't see that coming, honestly. And now that I've gotten used to CS4 I'm going to have a hard time adjusting. *sigh*

Figured I'd mention it, for obvious reasons. Didn't draw anything to mark the occasion because I couldn't think of anything (this is why I rarely draw Firehazard), but yeah, Chinese New Year was today. Well I guess it was mostly yesterday, in China. But I figured I'd have thought of something to draw by today, and then I didn't.

Anyway, Gung Hay Fat Choi and all that.

EDIT: Oh ho! Apparently I spoke too soon.

OK, here's the story.

For anyone who missed it, back on October 31 my computer stopped working, the cause quickly narrowed down to a hard drive malfunction, if not outright failure. This, it seemed, would mean I had lost all my files, including all the full-res, multi-layer originals of the stuff I post on here. I use those to get the colors right whenever I "ink up" a new drawing, so I'd have to guess from that point on. But more importantly (caution: pretentiousness ahead), and probably only people who have been through this sort of thing can really understand this, having one's life's work suddenly go up in flames like that has a way of sapping one's will to go on creating.

There was another thing, though. Looking at the projected expense of getting it all back (upwards of $600, with no guarantee it would even work) made me question why I cared. Why I would bother even trying to get it back. And why, honestly, I had even put so much time and effort into creating it in the first place. I started questioning the whole furry scene, and realized that, at best, we're a bunch of cartoonists making standalone drawings of perfectly ordinary stuff that somehow magically becomes interesting to us just because we put a dog face and tail on the characters. And what was worse, I had become One Of Those Furries. The ones who were well out of school but still live with their parents, have no job, and spend all their time surfing furry websites and playing video games. The ones I had always privately laughed at but also felt sorry for, because I figured there must have been something wrong with their brains to make them not capable of putting it away long enough to look for work. All I needed was a hoard of commissioned art on my walls and the transformation would be complete.

I knew This Shit Needed To Stop. And lo and behold, this was the perfect excuse.

Of course, I hadn't anticipated both my problems being fixed in such a hurry.

Two things happened not long after that. One, I figured out that my hard drive wasn't really dead after all. It had an overheating problem, which meant that once it was let to cool off, it would still run for an hour or so before conking out. Long enough to get all my stuff safely tranferred to its replacement. The second thing is that I found work. By which I mean the Web developers I had been working part-time for back in 2008 got over the slump they'd been in and have enough work for me again. It's still part-time, but it's more or less steady work for steady pay, and I suspect I'll have worked my way up to a full time position pretty soon. Plus, I actually like the work. I'd even go so far as to call it "fun."

Things are looking up.

...one of my favorite Christmas songs! Sing along if you know the words!

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash. and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Holler, dollar, cauliflower, alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby, lilla-boy, Louisville Lou!
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola-boola, Pensacoola, hullabaloo!

Ah, it just wouldn't be Christmas without the old classics.

I will get to the story of why I'm back soon enough, but first I'd like to alert any fellow artists to something. Once again I am in charge of running the Morphicon web site (although I didn't design it this year), and it needs some artwork to replace the many placeholder images that litter its surface. You don't have to be from the area or even planning to attend; any finished looking artwork that fits the theme will do.

More information can be found in the news post. We need to get a handle on who's putting what where so we don't get people trying to draw for the same slot (or drawing the same thing), but for now we just need to know who's interested.

Real life just showed up, and his message is "There can be only one."

http://octan.livejournal.com/126645.html

Mandy will likely continue, but only because I have too much invested in it at this point. I have absolutely nothing invested in you lot.

Disclaimer: I've never been one to demand that privately-run websites guarantee the same level of freedom of speech as the government does. I realize that, legally and even morally, they have every right to toss people out for whatever reason they want, up to and including personal disagreement. But I also believe that punishing users for mere criticism makes you a dick, and that other users ought to be aware when it is happening.

Recently a user named Vitae accused the FurAffinity staff of treating the people responsible for coding their long-awaited, often-touted and never-seen site redesign "Ferrox" as if they didn't exist. (Which, according to several accounts from actual former Ferrox coders, is true.) Forum admin "tsawolf" has decided this insubordination will not stand, and is turning their fate over to the userbase. [link]

The good news is that so far, the worst that will probably happen to Vitae is getting a derogatory user title on the forum. The bad news is that she's still being punished for stating an opinion. The worse news is that most of the people posting in the thread are totally OK with this.

I don't know how this will end, but be aware that apparently you are no longer allowed to have a negative opinion about this site.

I put my AIM on here so people who wish to hold real conversations with me can do so without having to ask up front. Not so random visitors to my gallery can suddenly pop up on my screen and leave generic fanboy comments that would be more appropriate for, say, my shoutbox. Contrary to what you might think, it is not going to endear you to me more or make our relationship more personal than that of a typical fan and artist. More like that of a typical stalker and stalk-ee. Please don't be a stalker.

...how they would have shot that album cover IRL. I figured bluescreen at first, but that wouldn't explain the "floating" hair. Fans, maybe? Or a really thorough gel job? Or would it be easiest to just grab some scuba gear and actually shoot it underwater? I ask because I'm thinking of doing a "behind the scenes" picture as a followup.

Anyone remember Little Blue Wolf? She's offering commissions for ... well, I had to do a double-take when I saw the prices! I dunno if she's really hard up for money, isn't aware how high the exchange rate is, or just doesn't realize what a legend she is, but seriously. GO COMMISSION HER NOW.

http://littlebluewolf.deviantart.com/

Is it really live? Because I can never get Ustream to play without getting stuck constantly trying to buffer... and it's like, their upload speed can't possibly be faster than my download speed, can it? Most providers I know of only give you upload of about 10% of your download limit, unless you're running a server and buy their "professional" service.

In case anyone cares, my Kill Bill parody is now available as a wallpaper over on deviantART: [link] I mention this because I can't upload wallpaper sets here.

As a followup to the drawings of Cheyenne dressed as one of the Portal turrets, I had planned to dress one of my male characters dressed as one of the turrets from either Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life 2. As it turns out, it is straight-up impossible to do. The models just don't translate to recognizable costume elements the way the Portal's do. A testament to just how feminine the Portal design team made them, I suppose, but it's not really helping me any.

Oh well. If I made one of the other turrets into a male furry, I'd just be getting requests to Rule 34 it with Cheyenne-turret. Or, in the case of the TF2 sentry, Rule 34 it with someone dressed as the Spy.

Heh heh. "Spah fappin' to my sentry!"

I blame Team Fortress 2. And fanaticfox for getting me hooked on it. It really is every bit as awesome as everyone says it is, and this is coming from the guy who always hated multiplayer shooters.

If you want to be able to blame Team Fortress 2 for your problems too, come join us on the Furry Pound! We have four public servers full of friendly people plus me, and tons of custom maps (some of which just have to be seen to be believed; I just discovered "Billiards" today and I was blown away). You'll usually see me playing as "Gordon Frohman" (it's an obscure reference, don't ask), but my official Steam username is "stevethepocket".

So my 10,000th pageview is coming up and I wonder what I should draw to celebrate it.

I want it to be kind of epic since I'll probably never hit a new digit again.

Suggestions welcome.

So, confession time. I've been having people ask me what's happening with my webcomic, and I've been kind of quiet on the issue thus far. Reason is, I'm a little ashamed at the answer. But in the interest of full disclosure, the sake of openness, and the blind hopes that someone here might be able to help, I finally feel obligated, and ready, to share.

I've never been very good at writing comedy. I know that sounds like an exaggerated attempt at modesty or low self esteem, but consider that professional cartoonists pump out seven strips a week, and even most webcomics run three times a week or more without a break, usually in full color. Me, I can't even hold down a twice-a-week schedule for more than a couple months straight. What's worse, almost every single comic I've ever done has run out after a few years. I just now added up all the comics I've stopped writing in my life; Podunk U, which ended last May, brings the total to ten.

Ever since I started inking Mandy strips I've been kidding myself about being able to keep up a regular schedule. The first several were pillaged from one of my other comics, whose canine protagonist didn't even talk. When I finally launched the comic, I did so knowing I hadn't written any new ones in months, but hoping that tying myself to a regular schedule would force the creative juices to start flowing. They did, but the results were disappointing. I devoted almost a year to a single storyline that still hasn't come close to reaching an end, when I had planned for a mostly gag-a-day series. I have also missed several updates, including an entire month last April, for lack of ideas.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. My website mysteriously goes down, as it had a few times before. After doing a little digging, it turned out the new company that had bought out my webhost (months ago, without my even being aware of it) had, without warning, spontaneously discontinued the free hosting service the previous host had offered. Add to that, a redesign of my website had been in development for a while, and due to compatibility issues with Safari, I decided I didn't want to re-launch the old one but instead wait till the new one was finished. This plus the search for a new host would take an indeterminate amount of time—indeterminate enough that I didn't want to get anyone's hopes up as to how soon they could expect the site to return.

And then, all those nagging feelings of impending failure crept right back up. Those voices that reminded me how poorly I was doing at maintaining a regular webcomic and asked, sincerely, how much longer it would take before I ran out of ideas and just gave up, and how much time, effort, and money I would end up investing in it before I finally admitted it to myself.

Fact is, I'm way better at creating comics than I am at actually writing them. And I am getting progressively worse: looking back at some of the comics in my folders from several years ago, a lot of them aren't very good by my standards now, but they clearly were for the time, and I was pumping out a lot more than two a week! That was just in the hours I had after school and homework; now I'm out of college with no day job and I'm feeling less inspired than ever. It's like somebody infected me with LIV (the Lack of Inspiration Virus) around the onset of college and my condition is gradually deteriorating until my idea-organ eventually fails and I die in a puddle of creative juices.

I don't know if there's a cure. I don't know if there's a treatment. And until one is found, I don't know if there's a snowball's chance I'll ever write comics again.

Is there a doctor in the house? :(

Just wiping that massive wall-o-text off my home page. Yikes. Adding auto-truncation to the list of recommended features for the next design update.

On another note, the Nostalgia Critic riffed on "Rock-a-Doodle" this week. Anyone who saw it as a kid or, like me, never saw it because the commercials made it sound incredibly stupid but always wondered what it was about, might want to take a look.

1. What does your furaffinity name mean and why?
It's the uncreative name of a character I had created not long before I joined. I honestly thought he'd be my ticket into the world of people who draw Disney-style animals all the time. Instead I ended up hardly ever drawing him. I always pick names I end up hating on the sites that don't let me change them. It's my curse. That and every computer I touch breaking.

2. What fandom were you obsessed with when you joined and what are you into now?
Early 2006, that'd have to be... Ozy and Millie.

3. How many watchers do you have now?
620.

4. Name 3 of your favourite artists on FA.
Jen Seng, Chris Evans, and.... let's see, who's actually still posting here? SilentRavyn I guess.

5. Do you comment, fav, or both?
Depends on whether I have something useful to say, consider the picture one of the best things I've seen on the site so far, or both.

6. Do you participate in clubs' contests here on FA?
There's... clubs? I figure there must be but I haven't seen any yet.

7. What is your most popular deviation?
Depending on whether you're going by faves or views, it's either "Cute little turret" or "Unauthorized material" -- both Portal fan art! You silly furries and your obsession with innovative video games.

8. What are your favourite non-anime TV shows?
Awful specific ain't we. OK then... Monk, Psych, The Big Bang Theory, and The Simpsons before it started to suck.

9. What are the things you wish you could draw better?
Those sorta impressionist backgrounds that are usually done in Painter or ArtRage.

10. Summer or winter?
Winter I guess. Because we don't have air conditioning.

11. Rain or Sun?
Sun.

12. What's your favourite type of music?
Catchy.

13. PC or Mac?
PC. I don't think I could ever justify the investment of a Mac.

14. Anime or Manga?
Anime I guess.

15. Coke or Pepsi?
Actually Food Club store-brand cola is my favorite.

16. Read or TV?
Read, if Internet counts.

17. How many hours a day do you spend on FA?
Less than one.

18. Name a hidden talent.
I can write music pretty well, I guess, although I really suck at lyrics.

19. Flash or traditional cartoons?
Traditional cartoons... MADE IN FLASH. I just blew your mind. Thought they were all stiff, Cartoon Network-y crap, didn'tcha?

20. What is your favourite fast food restaurant?
I'd say Arby's, but when you come right down to it their sandwiches are all stuff I could make at home for a lot cheaper.

21. What are your top 3 favourite books?
Harry Potter series
Discworld series
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series

22. Wii or Playstation?
Are we talking PS3 here? Did anything worthwhile come out for either? I'm a PC guy mostly.

23. Name 3 of your favourite bands.
The New Pornographers
They Might Be Giants
Barenaked Ladies

24. Are you a fast, slow, or medium typer?
Pretty slow. How long has it taken me to fill this much out, now?

25. Do you like Denny's?
I've really only been there once, and that was at breakfast. Anyone can make pancakes and scrambled eggs.

26. What is your favourite emoticon?
FRENCHMEN! :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D :^{D

27. What is your favourite type of pie?
Sweet potato. I had it just once and it's amazing. Imagine pumpkin pie with whipped cream and eggnog mixed in. That's literally what it looks and tastes like.

28. Have you ever stayed up for 24 hours?
Why, I'm doing it right now!

29. Do you go on YouTube a lot?
Meh. No more than most people probably.

30. Are you a member on any other sites besides FA?
deviantART, Facebook, ArtSpots, and numerous forums

31. Do you cosplay?
No.

32. Fruits or sweets?
That's kind of an odd question. Everybody needs fruit! USDA sez so. But I also need my fudge and KitKats. I sez so.

33. Buttered, plain, or salted popcorn?
Salted, with just a little butter flavor.

34. Have you skipped school?
Do college classes count? Then yes.

35. Have you been on a plane?
A long time ago.

36. Have you swum in an ocean?
Nope.

37. Have you been ice skating?
Nossir.

38. Favourite vacation spot
Disneywhicheverpark.

39. Ever been on TV?
I came close once, but no.

40. Favourite salad dressing?
Thousand island.

41. What do you do to relax?
Sleep. Pffffft.

42. What is the last film you saw in the theatres?
Indiana Jones and the Overly Long Movie Title

43. Favourite Sandwich?
That one from Team Fortress 2 because it magically heals all your wounds! I mean talk about a value meal.

44. If you could go anywhere in the world...
...then I would. That IS the serious answer.

45. Favourite time of the day?
Mid-afternoon?

46. What did you want to be when you were little?
Really little? An architect. I still wouldn't mind if the four extra years of school were free.

47. What do you want to be now?
The creator of a phenomenally successful animated series. Or the head of a software empire. I'm not power hungry; I just happen to think these kinds of jobs would be more fun than those on the lower rungs.

48. If you could eat with one person, who would it be?
I really have no idea. I'm sure I'd always be wondering afterwards what I missed out on by not picking someone else.

49. What character would you hate to be stuck in a room with?
Character? Like from TV or something? Hmm, Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory probably. Or Urkel. Heyyyy, what if Sheldon was stuck in a room with Urkel? Ahahahahaha oh yes there will be blood.

50. When is your birthday?
February 8.

51. Favourite type of ice cream?
Not long ago I would have said mint chocolate chip, but I discovered this one that's like, marshmallow flavor with fudge chunks in it. HEAVEN.

52. Last book you read?
I really have no clue. Probably something by Pratchett.

53. Which store would you max out a credit card at?
NewEgg. You never said it had to be a physical store! Of course, a week ago the answer would be Circuit City because everything was on clearance.

54. Do you buy / sell / both on eBay?
Hardly any of either. And I only ever sold one thing, through someone else's account because I had no feedback on mine.

55. What is the most annoying thing people ask you?
Actually I don't have one.

56. Favourite all time movie?
I will continue to say Secondhand Lions and continue to challenge the film industry to top it.

57. What was your favourite show when you were a kid?
Of all time? I was kid for a lot of seasons. XD I guess Sesame Street; it's the only one that lasted my whole childhood.

58. What are you listening to right now?
Billy Joel.

59. What is the last thing you ate?
This really good turkey casserole thing.

60. If you were a crayon what colour would you be?
Macaroni and Cheese.

61. What is the first thing you notice about the opposite sex?
That they are??? Hahahaha I'm such a failure at this stuff.

62. Favourite sport to play?
Miniature golf. I'm such a copout.

63. Favourite Day of the Year?
Yesterday.

64. Hugs or Kisses?
Hugs.

65. Vanilla or Chocolate?
Vanilla.

66. Favourite Board Game?
Sorry, I guess.

67. Favourite smells?
Brownies baking, freshly brewed coffee, and... there's this one smell my brain seems to dream up whenever I'm recovering from a cold. Maybe I'm just smelling everything I don't normally notice, because my nose has been too stuffed up to smell them for a while. If that's the case... the world smells freaking amazing.

68. What inspires you?
People saying funny things, mostly.

69. Do you have any piercings?
No.

70. How many siblings do you have?
One.

71. Bacon Bits or croutons?
Egh, no thanks. Celery is the hardest thing I'll tolerate on my salads.

72. Favourite Day of the Week?
Yesterd--wait, we already used this joke!

"Thaaaat's Steve!"

OK, Saturday I guess.

73. Favourite phrase?
I like-a to say, HOLY CRAP! Ha ha ha... obscure joke.

74. Favourite Restaurant?
I really don't eat out much... Mariachi Loco's I guess. I'd say Spaghetti Warehouse, but I've been there so many times by now that I'm starting to get sick of it.

75. Favourite animal?
Come on, man, I'm a furry. Don't make me frickin' choose.

76. Favourite thing to do outside
Drive nowhere in particular after sunset on a warm summer evening with the windows down and some appropriate road trip music on. Better yet, be a passenger in that scenario so I can actually watch the scenery.

77. Favourite thing to do when it's raining?
Pretty much everything I normally do.

78. Favourite Disney character?
Come on, man, I'm a furry. Don't make me frickin' ch--OK, Dodger, happy now?

79. Do you like coffee? If so, what is your favourite brand?
No. I wish they could make coffee that tastes exactly like it smells.

80. Tag 6 people. There is no question 80. Move along.

They're just about all still in there. I apparently got rid of the one of Firehazard (oh the irony) and the tiger photo I used before that.

http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/39...../faavatars.png

Tonight on Numb3rs there was a caption on a TV news story: "The Drug War; A Losing Battle?" I cringed. They made a mistake I've been seeing a lot just in the past month for some reason: using a semicolon where a colon should be.

If you don't know what the semicolon is supposed to be used for... don't beat yourself up; probably most people don't, and you can usually avoid it altogether. But it's the colon's job when you want to describe, reveal, or elaborate on something. A good example of proper colon use that you're likely to see outside of literature is movie titles that have subtitles in them, such as Revenge of the Telemarketers: This Time, It's Impersonal. Other common uses you're likely to see are sentences starting with "Note:", "Here's an idea:", or an Internet favorite, "Protip:".

Luckily I don't remember seeing this on this site anytime recently, but seriously. The more you know and junk.

The phrase is not "copyright to", "copyrighted to", or "copywritten." Just "copyright," or "©" by itself. Like "So-and-So is © the Brothers Chaps."

Don't even get me started on apostrophes.

A big thanks to everyone who helped out with my hunt for alternative drawing surfaces. Ultimately my hunt led me to the Dick Blick website (one of the biggest makers and suppliers of art supplies in America), through which I discovered that they still list Tru-Rite sulphite paper in their inventory, albeit through backorder. (90-lb. weight -- apparently only the 80-lb. was discontinued; go figure.) It came today. So I guess I won't be needing paper for a while! Heck, at the rate I go through with it, by the time I use up this ream I'll be the last cartoonist on earth who still uses real paper.

Meanwhile the Pacon crap is getting donated to the school where my dad works. Maybe their elementary art teacher can find a use for it. |:P

Got this one from  zinacat

"Generally speaking, people tend to have a 'defining image' that comes to mind when they think of a particular artist. Maybe it's one you can relate to, maybe it's the image that first introduced you to their work, maybe you just feel it was their absolute best, so it sticks out in your mind. So when ever you think of a certain artist, this image pops to mind.

So, I am curious, which of my works comes to mind when you think or hear of me?"

Furry pin-up calendars.

It occurred to me when I was making my year-in-review piece, which of course is laid out like an annual calendar and contains crops of several pictures that could be considered pin-ups. For all the erotic furry artists out there, and all the furries shameless enough to put outright porn on their desktops and even walls, you'd think there'd be quite a few out there, but I've never seen or heard of any.

I typed it into Google just now, and got exactly one page of results, most of which, as you can see, are totally irrelevant. Only one led me down a useful path, and I'd never even heard of the artist (although for what it's worth he is a pretty good one).

Maybe furries are too picky for such a thing to really work. Like, you couldn't create 12 images with distinct characters and/or themes that your customers would all like. And don't get me started on the idea of making it a compilation of multiple artists' work; I can barely find 12 artists whose work I really like, and many very popular ones are not on that list.

Anyway, yeah, I'm done musing. Carry on.

So, I have found out, too late, that the paper I'd been using to do my comics on has been discontinued. I have also found out firsthand that the kind online stores offer as a "substitute" is absolutely unusable. It's too thin, it's warped like it went through a rainstorm, it won't take the ink evenly, and it BLEEDS. The cardinal sin of paper intended for inking. I demanded a full refund for it and luckily I got one. I really hope the fact that it's being used as a substitute doesn't mean it's the best kind of drawing paper anyone makes anymore.

But the question I must now put to you all is, do you have any good recommendations? Previously I was using Riverside Tru-Rite sulphite drawing paper, 80lb weight. It was really smooth (on one side) and thick, but inexpensive. I really don't want to have to switch to Bristol board because that stuff is insanely pricey.