CAUTION! Someone is possibly trying to impersonate me on DeviantArt!

I have been selling my artwork under the alias of "Hoagiebot" for 25-years now. I have had my artwork website at hoagiebot.com since 2002, before FurAffinity existed, and when FurAffinity became the biggest thing in the furry fandom years ago I created an account here. I have exhibited my furry artwork as Hoagiebot at over 75 furry, anime, and Science Fiction art shows over the past 20-years. I have worked for decades to establish a presence in the online art community. And it looks like someone's possibly trying to take advantage of all of that, because it just came to my attention that someone who isn't me has just recently registered my artist name over on DeviantArt, possibly to impersonate me and trick the artists that I regularly do business with that have a presence over there.

The account was only created 2-months ago, which more or less corresponds with the recent wave of online artist impersonators that has become a plague scamming people on sites like FA and YCH.Commishes. In hindsight, I definitely should have registered my username over there to preemptively protect it-- something I am very much kicking myself for not doing now! I have accounts on over 200-sites on the Internet as it is, so on one hand I can kind of forgive myself for not thinking of creating a placeholder account on DeviantArt after all this time, but on the other hand with how much someone could potentially confuse my customers or damage my reputation masquerading and me over there if there was any art site that I should have created a placeholder account on it was probably that one. I am not happy with the situation that I put myself in, believe me!

I have contacted DeviantArt's "abuse" e-mail address to see if there is anything that they can do to assist me with resolving this. Hopefully I will hear back from them, and hopefully they will be able help me. If I could somehow take control of the account from the imposter before they do something really heinous with it that would be best, but I don't know if that's a possibility. In the meantime, if you get contacted by "hoagiebot" over on DeviantArt pleased be advised that it is not me, and beware that they are an imposter. Also, if anyone has had any past experiences with dealing with something like this, I would be very interested to hear about the outcome and am open to suggestions on how to best handle it. Thanks!

I am extremely happy to report that for the past week my website at http://www.hoagiebot.com/ has been back online, so you can see all of my furry, kemonomimi, and cartoon animal artwork that I have created over the years there again! There are a few stray subdomains here and there that I may still need to re-forward to my new hosting provider, and my old animatronic robot fox project blog from the mid-2000's is still offline, but those are small details in the grand scheme of things and will be fixed soon. In addition, I am in the process of getting some of my newer artwork from the past few years uploaded to the website and will announce when I have that completed here in a new journal post. Thank you for your patience and support!

My personal website, www.hoagiebot.com , which showcased all of my furry pin-up girl and cartoon animal artwork, sadly went down a few days ago. The reason for this is because my web hosting provider, Furry Networks, has just ceased operations. This has left me scrambling to find a new web host so that I can bring my website back online.

This is a shame, since my website has been online continuously since 2001, which makes it one of the older surviving websites of the furry fandom. First coming online in March of 2001, it was originally hosted by the notorious free web host, Angelfire. By the Fall of 2002 I had moved my website to a dedicated furry-run web hosting provider, Furtopia.org. While Furtopia.org now only exists as an online forum, back in 2002 it was also a vibrant web hosting service and had probably 100 or more furry artists' websites on it, which Furtopia generously hosted for free. It was great having my website hosted by fellow members of the fandom, and Furtopia felt like a real community. I still fondly remember the Furtopia member in-person meetups that we used to have at the Midwest Furfest convention years ago before that convention got too mindbogglingly huge to plan such meets. Furtopia graciously hosted my website until 2011 when they sadly decided to shut the web hosting part of their operations down. Looking for another furry web hosting provider, I was lucky enough to find Furry Networks, which was run by a great furry and brony named TigerPaw. He was kind enough to also be willing to host my website for free, and my website was hosted there from October of 2011 until this week.

Since I have had such wonderful experiences with furry-run web hosting services in the past, I wanted to keep my streak of good fortune going and find another furry web host to use. However, I have very quickly discovered that the furry web hosting landscape is nothing like how it was back in 2002 or even in 2011. Nearly every furry web host of old, with their wonderful quirkiness and feelings of camaraderie, are gone, lost to the digital sands of time. There are some newer furry web hosting services around, with some even responsible for hosting the websites of current furry conventions, but many of them aren't free and they certainly aren't host to large and vibrant furry web communities like Furtopia used to be. In fact, some of them are all-business-oriented and cost even more than the basic plans of the big web hosting providers! Even so, I found 5 furry-run web hosts that I have sent out inquiries to, and I am hoping that I'll hear back from some of them (and that one of them will become my website's new home). In any case, I am hoping to have my website back online by the end of this weekend, even if it means that I have to sign-up with a large non-furry-run hosting service to do it..

But until then, if anyone has any suggestions or endorsements for a cheap (or free!) reliable web hosting provider that they like I am all ears!

Things were looking pretty uncertain at first about whether or not I would be participating in the Midwest Furfest Art Show this year because I was on the art show's waiting list, but I am happy to announce that I was granted all of my art show panel space and I just finished hanging up all of my artwork in the show this afternoon! It's hard to imagine, but this is my 15th year participating as an artist in Midwest Furfest's art show! Man how time flies!

In this year's art show I have 4-panels' worth of artwork in the general audience section and 2-more panels of filled to the brim with artwork in the mature audience section. In addition, have one brand new art piece debuting in the general audience section, a cute original colored-pencil drawing of an adorable female cartoon animal serval character that I designed named, "Skye." The art piece is called, "Making Her Heart Soar," and it features her getting excited while watching aircraft take off. If you enjoy some of the more adorable artwork that I draw you won't want to miss out on this one!

TL;DR - My Midwest Furfest Art Show appearance at a glance:
* Where: Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, Illinois
* When: Dec 6-8, 2019
* How: As an attending artist
* Number of Art Pieces Being Entered: 50

Sadly, after going to Midwest Furfest every year for 15-straight years, I wasn't able to make it to the convention this year. This was a real heartbreaker for me, because Midwest Furfest is my "home" furry convention (I live in the greater Chicago Metropolitan Area), it is the only furry convention that I am able to go to each year, and since I have been at every single one of them since MFF 2003 it has become a huge fixture in my life. In fact, up until this point, not attending Midwest Furfest would have been absolutely unthinkable for me. But alas, missing one has finally happened. Along with missing the convention itself, this is the first time in 12-straight years that my artwork has not been exhibited in the MFF convention's art show. To anyone who attended MFF this year and hoped to see my latest offerings in their art show, I'm sorry.

As for why I couldn't attend this year, it was due to a combination of factors, but by far the most significant one was that I just wasn't able to get a room in the convention hotel or an adjacent overflow hotel. For those who didn't already know, after two severe spinal cord injuries I have been left partially paraplegic. Thanks to surgeries and intensive rehab I can still walk, but my balance is terrible, I have to take stairs really slowly, I don't have the coordination to run anymore even if my life depended on it, and I am not allowed to lift more than 15-pounds. These limitations pretty much necessitate my needing to get a room at the convention hotel itself, or at least a hotel that is really close such as being across the street or connected via a sky-bridge or something. I just wouldn't be able to carry my art show artwork, which is in a giant box that weighs about my maximum 15-pounds, much further than that for art show setup and teardown, and trying to haul all of that stuff back and forth via several shuttle bus trips would just be too difficult and time-consuming for me.

Because of the importance of getting a room at the convention hotel itself, on the morning that this year's MFF room block opened I was ready-- I woke up early that morning, and I was already on the phone with a Hyatt reservation representative 10-minutes before the room block opened with my information already given to them so that all they had to do is click "submit" on their end to reserve my room as soon as the block opened up. As a backup, I had my Web browser opened and ready to go to try and reserve a room through the Hyatt Regency O'Hare's website if I needed to. When the clock counted down to zero and the room-block opened however, everything went awry for me. The Hyatt phone reservation representative's computer froze under the weight up the incoming rush of people making reservations, causing it to time out and lose my reservation information on Hyatt's end. Seeing that my attempt to reserve a room through the phone had just shockingly failed, I quickly tried to reserve a room through the hotel's website, but it was already too late. In that short of a time the hotel was already booked solid. I heard that the MFF room block filled in 30-seconds, and I have also heard rumors that there were furs out there that were bragging that they were using "bot" programs to reserve rooms at lightning speed. The best room that I could get was at a place miles away that offered no shuttle service, which I later canceled because it was just too far away and inconvenient to offer me any benefit.

Throughout the year I tried again and again to see if I could reserve a room at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare and catch someone else's cancellation, but I never got lucky. I also had one friend get my hopes up by texting me at work that he had a spare room at the Hilton across the street that he would transfer to me, but by the time that I saw the text and responded some hours later he had already cancelled the room. As a desperate last-minute plan I also thought about just driving back-and-forth and commuting to the convention each day from home, but since the hotel parking garage would have no doubt been full it would have been hard for me to carry my art show setup materials from the further away public parking garages. In addition, I wouldn't have been able to make it there on Friday (art show setup day) at all because I had both an early morning meeting and a late afternoon meeting at work that day, the attendance of both which was compulsory. The final straw that broke the camel's back however, was that I have been sick in bed with an upper-respiratory infection all weekend. There was just no way that I could pull off any superhuman last-minute convention packing, travelling, and attending feats when I am feeling rundown and coughing my lungs out. After combining all of these factors attending this year's Midwest Furfest just wasn't meant to be. If Midwest Furfest was still how it once used to be many years ago, at the Hyatt Regency Woodfield in the western suburbs, where hotel parking was both free and plentiful, commuting back-and-forth would have been so much easier of an option and I just might have been able to force myself to soldier through despite it probably not being that great of an idea health-wise, but Rosemont just makes things so much more inconvenient (and expensive). I just couldn't overcome all of that.

With my hopes of attending MFF this year down in flames, my worries now are for whether or not I'll be able to get a hotel room for MFF in 2018. If the hotel reservations go like they did for this year's MFF getting any kind of a hotel room will be a roll of the dice, with the dice weighted unfairly into the favor of unscrupulous furs and their bot programs. We have already suffered through two years straight of this sort of hotel-reservation insanity, so I am praying that the board for MFF has taken Anthrocon's lead and taken some steps to address this issue. I, personally would be in favor of the convention and/or hotel implementing any or all of the following policies for next year:

* The hotel website implementing one or more CAPTCHAs on their MFF room reservation website to help prevent the use of bots for online reservations.
* The hotel instituting a cost-of-one-night non-refundable deposit fee for room reservations, which would apply towards the cost of the stay after the stay has been completed. This would put a stop to people who are only half-serious about possibly attending from locking up large amounts of rooms and would also likely help curb the use of bots to some degree.
* The convention opening up the room-block up early to vendors, panelists, and maybe, just maybe please, art show artists, because people who are contributing to your convention's programming should be able to at least attend the convention.
* The convention opening up the room-block up early to super-sponsors, just like Anthrocon does. While I don't necessarily want to have to pay hundreds more just to secure a hotel room in the convention hotel, if that is the only way that I can secure one then I will pay.

If none of the steps listed above are taken then there will just be no guarantee that I will ever be able to attend my long-time favorite convention again-- if it becomes impossible to get a room then it becomes extremely hard for me to go. I hope that somehow someway things get better.

Great news! I will be participating as a mail-in artist in the Biggest Little Fur Con 2016 Art Show that is taking place next week! This will be my 2nd year participating as a mail-in artist in this particular convention's art show, and I will be exhibiting 54-art pieces there in both the general audience and mature audience sections. One of the art pieces that I am sending to the show is a brand new original colored pencil drawing that once again features "Luna," my female anthro wolf character that I designed 14-years ago and recently started drawing again! The new art piece is called, "Luna Showing Off Her Bikini Bottom," it is an 8.5"x11" drawing matted to 11"x14", and it shows Luna in a racy but fun pin-up style pose where she is playfully showing you her bikini-clad rear end! You can see a scan of this art piece on my website here: http://www.hoagiebot.com/gallery/webluna7.jpg (Warning: This image is very possibly NSFW!) The starting bid price for this art piece at the BLFC Art Show is $25, and I hope that this fun-loving bikini-wearing wolfess finds a buyer to go home with!

The Biggest Little Fur Con 2016 furry convention will be taking place at the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino in Reno, Nevada, from May 12-15. If you're going to be attending this convention please be sure to check out my artwork in the art show!

TL;DR - My Biggest Little Fur Con Art Show appearance at a glance:
* Where: Grand Sierra Resort and Casino, Reno, Nevada
* When: May 12-15, 2016
* How: As a mail-in artist
* Number of Art Pieces Being Entered: 54

I will be participating as a mail-in artist in the Texas Furry Fiesta 2016 Art Show! This will be my 5th year participating as a mail-in artist in this convention's art show, and I will be entering a full 55-art pieces into the show spread across three 4'x4' General Audience Panels and two 4'x4' Mature Audience panels. 2 of the 55 art pieces are brand new (I finished them just last Saturday!) and they'll be making their debut at this art show. The first is a small original colored pencil drawing on a 2.5"x3.5" art card, matted to 5"x7", featuring a female gray wolf furry character of mine named "Luna" that up until now I actually hadn't drawn in 14-years! This poor wolf gal was originally created and drawn multiple times back in 2002 and was going to be the co-star of a furry Sci-Fi story that I was outlining at the time, but unfortunately for her my mind wondered onto other things and I never got back to her. That all changed last weekend however as she once again captured my imagination, and I ended up drawing her wearing an updated version of her favorite green bikini that she wears in all of her drawings. The drawing is called "Luna Back in Her Green Bikini," and you can see a scan of this art piece on my website here: http://www.hoagiebot.com/gallery/webluna6.jpg The starting bid price for this art piece at the Texas Furry Fiesta Art Show is $15, and I hope that this swimsuit-loving wolfess blast from the past finds a good home!

The second new art piece for this convention is a mature audience piece and features one of my female furry vixen characters, "Clover." It is also a small original colored pencil drawing on a 2.5"x3.5" art card, matted to 5"x7". This art piece has a bit of a St. Patrick's Day theme, and as such is shows Clover's nude body with nothing but a four-leaf-clover being pressed against it. The art piece is called "Feeling Lucky," and has the lucky starting bid price of $7 in the Texas Furry Fiesta Art Show.

The Texas Furry Fiesta 2016 furry convention will be taking place at the The InterContinental Dallas Hotel in Dallas, Texas, from March 11-13. If you're going to be attending this convention please be sure to check out my artwork in the art show!

TL;DR - My Texas Furry Fiesta Art Show appearance at a glance:
* Where: The InterContinental Dallas Hotel, Dallas, Texas
* When: March 11-13, 2016
* How: As a mail-in artist
* Number of Show Panels Reserved: 3-General Audience, 2-Mature Audience
* Number of Art Pieces Being Entered: 55