New Naylorcast is up. It's only about 26 minutes long this time, since the questions I have to answer have slowed down a bit. If I didn't get to yours, I'm sorry. It's been a long time since I've compiled one of these. The main topics are SSL Certificates, character bio pages, and the current Original Life story arc.

http://www.jaynaylor.com/audio/Nayl.....6-11-05-16.mp3

Fifth Naylorcast is in the can. I kept this one to under 30 minutes, and I think that's a good way to keep them. I think I'm getting to the point where I've answered all the biggies, and now it'll just be a trickle of this and that as things come up in comics. I had to hunt up the questions that were addressed to me weeks ago, so if I missed any, forgive me.

http://www.jaynaylor.com/audio/Nayl.....5-11-04-12.mp3

The audio page on the site won't be updated right away. It's something Mahrkale does when she has the time. But for now, this link will suffice!

I started putting things back in my DA account (http://jaynaylor.deviantart.com/) after a long hiatus of ignoring it. I reserved it for more of my bigger, finished pieces, and not-necessarily-adult work. Although that's such a subjective area, I'm just using my judgement as I go. FA (http://www.furaffinity.net/user/fisk/) continues to be the wholesale public cork-board for my work, where I put everything from scribbles to comic sample pages. Mostly because I have a bigger following there, and that pretty much has to do with the nature of most of my characters.

I have noticed that on FA, I can guarantee a greater number of favorites for an image depending on how nude and/or sexually explicit an image is. The latter usually guarantees the most number of favorites. On DA, it's quite different. Nudity doesn't guarantee more favorites in my gallery. DA favorites seem motivated by whatever people are interested in the picture's theme, or it's cuteness level, or however it relates to their interests in something else (the My Little Pony human interpretation is getting the most attention - not sure how I feel about that :3 ). It's a mild observation. I don't think about favs when I'm working on something that I'm going to post. But it does show the differences between the two sites. A big downside to DA is that the "scrapbook" section gets almost no attention. It's not a single click from the artist's main page, like it is on FA.

In other news, I'll probably work up another Naylorcast tomorrow (4/8/2011) to handle some of the comic related questions and comments that piled up. Speaking of which, the audio section of the site is up, here: http://www.jaynaylor.com/audio.html and every cast has a drop down menu with a list of the topics that are covered. I'm going to see if I can keep them short for the future, but I always say that and it never happens. I keep getting the same questions from people, so check to see if your question is addressed before asking! Thanks!

Because the political/economic/philosophical questions are usually more complicated and take up a lot of time to answer, I'm going to relegate them to their own audio files. I'll keep the questions about my comics and writing to separate files so people can have more control over what they listen to.

This audio file is an hour dedicated to someone's question about The Venus Project and resource based economy. It's something I can't just cover blithely in a few minutes. I'll probably have another cast tomorrow to answer some of the comic related questions that have built up.

Mahrkale is working on an audio page for the website and it should be up very soon. It'll have a drop down menu so you can see which questions are covered in each cast. After it's up, be sure to check it to see if your question has already been addressed!

http://www.jaynaylor.com/audio/Nayl.....4-11-03-15.mp3

Tons of questions this time! Holy scrotilia... this is an hour and thirty minutes of audio to address all these things.

Some questions came in while I started the recording. They came as responses to my journal on FA, and I'm just going to roll them into next week's audio.

http://www.jaynaylor.com/Naylorcast.....3-11-03-04.mp3

I'll allow more questions to compile here for anyone who wants to open a discussion along the same lines as last time. General rules still apply for what I'm taking, with an added one after last time.

I'll ignore questions like these:

1.) Rude questions (Why were you an asshole when you did...?)
2.) Trite questions (What's Abigail's favorite ice cream flavor?)
3.) Leading questions (Why do you hate gays/women/blacks/etc...?)
4.) Questions that can be answered by reading my comics (What's Fisk's job?)
5.) Questions that would spoil future stories (Will this character go and do this and this?)
6.) Spamming question-barrage (an immense numbered list of questions that would take up a lot of time to answer)

The last addition is in response to an email I received like this. It's not a personal slight that I don't wish to address the list. Some questions struck me as unimportant and trite, while others seemed vaguely related to things others were asking. But most of all, addressing the list in a thorough manner would have taken up a lot of time. I don't like to give flippant answers and I try to explain myself when it's warranted. I sometimes divert when I answer things.

A follow up cast addressing some things that didn't get covered, as well as some follow up questions from the first cast. It addresses useless comments, people pretending to be me on the internet, another question about philosophy and debate, remarks about adult stories with a context, and some Original Life character questions. This one comes in at just under 30 minutes.

And I've learned I need to stop puffing into the mic.

http://www.jaynaylor.com/Naylorcast.....2-11-02-25.mp3

Answers to a whole ball-load of questions asked after my last post! Wow, 50+ minutes of audio! Quickly done during this evening... I may do more. Unsure. But it was a lot faster than typing out all those answers.

http://www.jaynaylor.com/Naylorcast001.mp3

Open question idea explained on LJ. http://fiskblack.livejournal.com/96671.html

The sketch harvest continues. I uploaded my notable sketches from 2010 and I'm looking back at 2009. I'll probably keep going back in time until the sketches resemble the kind of work I don't like showing off or looking back on.

I apologize if this process is coming off as spammy to some people, but I try to space it out. I'll probably just do one small batch per day from now on, as I go backwards in time.

I've received a trickle of email over the last month that's lead me to realize something I knew would happen. Those who listened to me from the beginning and approached Original Life as its own comic, are enjoying it. Those who wanted Better Days repackaged with newer characters, are disappointed. From the very beginning I noted that Original Life would mostly be the kind of fun light stories I actually enjoyed doing more. I said there would be no named chapters to contain plot arcs so I would have the liberty to create single page comics on the fly, whenever it struck me to do so.

I'll restate everything I said from the very beginning of Original Life:

Better Days was an experiment in my first webcomic. Originally meant to be funny, I decided to give it very heavy dramatic moments and carried it a long way. But the most fun I had in Better Days was doing the lighter chapters. I also felt limited while doing Better Days. I was unable to react to observations of current trends and events (such as record cold weather, or Tron, or whatever video game I was playing). I couldn't insert a stand-alone page about a stand-alone topic in a chapter that's designated for a specific plot arc. I have all that freedom with Original Life and I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying doing the light stuff I want to do. I'm enjoying robotic teddy bears, commenting on video games, movies, and philosophy, without being too heavy handed with the drama. If you're looking for rape, gunplay, and incest, you're not going to find it. If you're looking for Better Days part 2, you will not find it, and I've been clear about this for the beginning.

Better Days was created when I was a very different person. I had very different views, values, and priorities, and I evolved as a person as I was doing Better Days over the course of six years. There's a lot in Better Days that I wouldn't include if I was doing it today. There's a lot of things that I wrote that I wouldn't have written that way, now. I don't like looking at the old pages. I don't like looking at the old art. It's embarrassing and bad in my eyes. I don't like lingering on the past. It's enough that I've left the archive in place, and find myself having to explain some of the themes and events depicted in Better Days, by a much younger, less mature creator, compared to who I am today.

Better Days had an end planned out all the way from the very beginning. When it was done, I had to do something else: something I wanted to do and had more freedom to go in any direction I wanted. Better Days is what it is and it will always be that. I will not try to repackage it as something else and try to make lightening strike twice.

I've organized my work to restore on FA. I've come to the realization that the admins have put restoring the damage done at such a low priority, I'd rather go in and just repost. It will put a few things out of order, but I'd rather have that, than sit around waiting on someone else for months, or longer.

It's not going to be a comprehensive re-upload. There may be some things I don't include, and I actually ran across some other things that I didn't include before, that I'll go ahead and put up this time. I'm just putting up things that I want there, so don't send me messages saying "there was this one pic I remember that you forgot" etc.. etc..

All in all, there are some 52 images I'll be uploading to my regular and scrap galleries this weekend.

... is to mention the possibility of a free commission in your journal.

The other way is to post one of your old characters dead in a bathroom stall.

Pondering a betting pool on when FA gets around to restoring the deleted submission pages from my gallery. Maybe the person who guesses the closest to the date without going over will get a free commission. Maybe we can turn this into something fun.

The alternative would be to go back and re-upload everything, but that would knock everything out of sequence and I wouldn't be certain about what was uploaded where. A lot of folks have asked about the missing images, but for now I've just decided to wait for the FA administration. If the pages can be restored I'll know exactly where to upload the missing art, and probably not have to weather weeks of fav-bombs.

I've been told that the FA admins can restore the lost entry pages to my account (there were a lot) but I will have to re-upload the actual images via the edit feature on the entry pages. This is good because it'll remind me of what I have to restore. I'm told restorations should occur this weekend, so I'm going to just wait for that. We'll see how things go.

For the longest time I refused to favorite anything to avoid explanations over what made me fave something and not fave something else. It's annoying and weird and awkward and never feel like explaining myself to strangers. But I decided to start adding faves to my FA page. I'm mainly just favoriting images that are well done and thoughtful pieces that show my characters.

So, it's not so much as a "favorite" list as it is a "thank you" list to showcase other good talent that depicted something of mine, for whatever their reason.

(cross posted from Inkbunny)

I'm at odds for what to do with my Inkbunny account. Right now, I have an FA account which hosts just about everything I draw for free, and a DA account for a lot of the better images I put a little extra effort into for all ages. I'm not sure what kind of audience I would get at IB that isn't just a bunch of overlap from FA if I simply mirror what I put here.

I don't really need the economic features of Inkbunny since I release projects for my website that make plenty of money. I'm not sure if releasing those projects on IB, as well, would simply siphon customers away from my site, causing me to lose money on the transaction costs, or if it would actually generate new customers. I'm inclined to think the former. Though I'm not beyond doing an experiment in the future in order to test things.

We'll see how that goes, and I'll let you know if and when I decide to do it. One thing's for sure, I don't want this to simply be a mirror of my FA account, upload for upload.

Yeah, okay, I don't care. Don't contact me privately, don't post shouts on my FA front page advertising any "movement". Free speech rights don't trump private property rights and I don't care about your little fringe crusade. The degree to which I cater to you is the degree offered by your imagination.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's nothing you have to worry about.

A write-up of my impressions. http://fiskblack.livejournal.com/95664.html

Trixie's project is completed and doing rather well on the catalog. I've laid out the projects that are swimming around in my mind and I have a pretty good idea of my production schedule into next year. I'm going to try to alternate my scheduling of projects to create a better rhythm and be able to release more per year. I'm going to cycle big projects (10+ pages) with smaller ones that don't necessarily have complicated stories or settings requiring much build up. I'm going to steer away from doing black and white comics in the future, even to save time. All I can do is look at them and wonder how much better they'd look in color, and they never perform quite as well as color works.

The closer these are to the top, the more likely they are to be next. I'm pretty certain I'll be doing Mikey's Beginning next.

Mikey's Beginning - An "origins" story for Mikey. It's an accounting of how he got to be the way he is, in an amusing way. It's going to be perhaps 6 pages long and be completely visual. It's going to be Priscilla the Poodle's comic debut as well. I'm going to do this as a short comic before diving into another Red Riding Hood chapter.

Red Riding Hood 4 - This will be an undertaking. I've about carried out the RRH plot to the point I can without making major upheavals or destroying any chance to reveal new things. At the very least, coverage of Red Riding Hood herself is being minimized, since she's kind of run her course. I'm still somewhat torn between two ideas. One carries on the story within the human royal family. The other idea involves a "chronicle" of the world the plot takes place in, as told by a group of female explorers from an outside race (elves?). I'm going back and forth, but right now I'm leaning toward the former, since it would involve things already familiar to me. The latter would greatly expand the scope of the world, but might lose the intimacy of the prior stories completely, as it would be told as a scientific accounting of affairs, amid explicitly depicted sex.

Cheaters - I'm still debating a few plot points on this one, and it's a "medium" sized project, so it keeps getting pushed around the schedule inside my head. It's a story involving Sissy and Marcus and their present state of... uh... affairs.

Priscilla's Twins - For lack of a better title. It's a story that will also take place in Priscilla's mansion involving twin cats, male and female, who are her maids. It has a significant BDSM aspect to it, and an element of blue-balled agony and teasing that I really want to depict. I'm debating whether or not to put Sparky in this one. There's a role she could fill, but Priscilla's butler could equally fit.

Mary Ann's Choice - Another one that constitutes a "small" project. It would be a sequel to Trish's Doodle. It would involve Trish, with her new penis, and Alexander colliding with one another on their way to be with Mary Ann, and then barging in on her to force her to make a choice. The twist would be several explicit and utterly debauched pages of Mary Ann having already succumbed to a pack of anthropomorphic canines to the point of having been dressed up as a human doggy girl prior.

I have a lot of other tentative ideas in my mind, but those are the most solidified, right now.

As usual I didn't have as much done as I wanted before this convention weekend. Since I don't normally do things at conventions during the day, I'll try to get a lot of work done this weekend. Commissions are being worked on, I'm just not taking any new ones at the moment.

A big journal post with 32 pictures from my Michigan vacation this weekend!

http://fiskblack.livejournal.com/95183.html

A long LJ entry about taking control of one's life from twisted people who want a stake in it. Worth a read for anyone in a bad relationship and want the courage to seize control of their lives and work to get out of it.

http://fiskblack.livejournal.com/94724.html

The MacBook Pro I was selling has already sold to a good home! Awesome.

Let's leave this here to bump the old journal off.

I'm selling my first MacBook Pro. It was my first laptop, first Mac, and was my main workhorse for a little over a year before I picked up a newer unibody 15" MacBook Pro. I kept the old one around in case I found a use for it for something, but I really haven't. It's just sitting idle and unused and it's a shame because it's a really nice laptop that could be of great use to someone. It's produced a lot of comics for me and ran Photoshop very smoothly. It's been factory reinstalled and upgraded with Snow Leopard. Here's the quick rundown:

15" MacBook Pro (4,1)
2.4ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
250GB HDD
Bluetooth
2 USB 2 ports
1 Firewire 400
1 Firewire 800
Dual-link DVI output
Built-in Webcam
Expresscard 34
DVD-R
OSX Snow Leopard
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

Pictures and more on LJ! http://fiskblack.livejournal.com/94216.html

Online estimates had it around $800, but I'm willing to part with it for less to move it along. Float me a line with offers and questions if interested!