I'm back on IZ7 again - every time I (accidentally) take a hiatus from this series, I forget just how much fun it is to write. The amount of enjoyment you can have just having two furry girls running up and down a corridor that's essentially a bouncy castle, being sprayed with more and more slime along the way, is pretty much limitless.

It says something that I think other people have been writing far more IZ than I have myself recently... the latest is a Saturday IZ Easter special by  wamkitty, which involves bunnies, eggs, 'painting' (after a fashion) and a lot of chocolate. And it's about as great as that sounds :) Read it here!

I've been writing a lot of side stories recently, but IZ7 hasn't been neglected - while I get to writing a third round of it,  fyrefennec has written a couple of great additional scenes with her character Quinne and the rest of the team members.

Quinne's IZ Intro has her arrival at the studio and her introduction to the rest of her team, and the extra scene describes what happened in the opposite shower room while Nyte was distracted :)

Give her some comments if you enjoy them!

And have I mentioned this picture series yet?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EVJ4bPbAR0#t=5m

I remember seeing this and not reading anything into it at all, 20 years ago... I think I was fated to grow up wrong in the head from a very early age.

It's a new and surreal experience for me to have new IZ to read instead of write... but  thefanfox recently asked if she could write something based on a new recruit coming to the studio, and came up with a great story called "Backstage Crew".

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/4605991

If you're a fan, please give it a read and throw some comments her way :) I enjoyed it a lot, and even had to ask if I could subsequently use one of her characters in stories of my own because I ended up liking him so much!

I found another thing that I used to guiltily watch when in school had made its way to Youtube - Twister was a replacement for Fun House that ran for one series after CITV realized they'd forgotten to pay about nine years of royalties to the creator of the show, or something. (You'll need a proxy if you're curious enough to view it outside of the UK - daveproxy.co.uk worked well for me).

I remember it was one of the most... inconsistent messy shows, sometimes being completely clean but introducing the series with a game that was... well, if there was some sort of gunge Richter scale, from, say, Countdown (absent) to Industrial Zone (ludicrous), these would be well up there in "phenomenal" territory. On top of that, I've never seen such... loving gunge shots, capturing every pour out of the bloody great industrial hoppers(!) overhead and going in to slow motion for closeups of each drip and splash. They were trying to cause a fetish. (As further evidence, they had gunge pillow fighting as well.)

I did something I shouldn't have done. I saw they gave the players' full names at the start, so I Googled one of them on a whim and found out that ten years later, she's now an FHM model.

This is not fair.

The other part of my revival of the Industrial Zone site is reopening the forum that I made up for it. You can now get to it here:

http://ironk.byethost13.com/industr.....zone/index.php

This is something of a writing experiment, about discussing IZ within the fictional world but outside the stories. Most of the people on there just now are fictional characters played by me or by :susi:, and you might recognize some of them from the series or from other stories that I've written. But a couple of other accounts have also sprung up and I have no clue who they are :)

So if you're a fan, if you want to prompt the forum inhabitants to answer anything, or if you just want to say hello to them, sign up as somebody and post away. I'll try and keep it updated as I think up new discussions to get going, but having even a couple of other posts on there will really fuel it - already I've really enjoyed thinking about how the various characters of mine would react to what the other people there are saying.

Have fun :)

I've been "contracting out" a couple more side projects to go along with IZ7... the first is that the Industrial Zone site, which has gone untouched for some time, now has a playable version of the game from the Pod on it! http://ironk.byethost13.com/industr.....zone/games.php - Scroll down to "The Pod", select it and then "Play" to see how good you are at finding the six unique symbols before time runs out.

It is, I feel it only fair to warn you, completely fucking impossible - as I discovered with greater consequences when I played a paper version at the hands of  susi last month. I've got up to five so far, but I've seen screenshot evidence of him getting to six!

Best of luck...

To get myself off the front page... I thought that I had exhausted the supply of scenes that led me to where I am today, but a conversation with Susi about people with enormous furry crushes on Bowser ensued soon after I arrived at his place, and that suddenly dredged a comic that I'd seen when I was about eight from my memory. A short search on the Internet, and here it is:

http://trsrockin.com/images/smb_fair4.jpg (Other pages have obvious URLs around this one, but... this is the main event)

Yes, just water this time, but once again I can't believe the extent to which my childhood entertainment collaborated to irreversibly mess me up in the head.

First of all, I'd like to express my thanks for all the sympathy that I got in my last journal entry, you bunch of bastards. ;) As demanded, I have a couple of pictures from the event... normally I wouldn't put them up, but I think being around Susi is having an effect on my inhibitions, and I said that I'd try as long as I was unrecognizable - something at which this thing did a pretty efficient job.

http://ironk.byethost13.com/doom.html

Susi prepared a version of the game from the Pod from IZ - something that I invented seven years ago, never tried for myself and have just found out the hard way that it's completely impossible. As I completely failed, the initial dome and reaction are pictured, and then the subsequent squirming - the tank had a four-gallon payload, and it must have gone on for about ten seconds. You might also notice that I'm completely plastered with shaving cream from the start, due to a rule that he didn't tell me about until we'd started where I'd get a hit with a pie for every symbol that I missed. (Three of four).

The verdict? Well, it's... heavy! It's odd how much it feels like water for a tiny split-second at the start, and then it just... collapses on top of you in one of the weirdest feelings I've ever experienced. To look on the bright side, I'm definitely going to be writing from this experience when an IZ episode is next released...

I'm at  susi's for the weekend. Outside, there's an arrangement of pipes being rigged up over a garden chair, and beside it is a five gallon container of liquid hydroxyethylcellulose (known in my stories as something else) that was mixed yesterday and is now approaching full thickness.

You've got to laugh at what your life's come to, sometimes. I think I can hear the faint sound of every character I've ever written with cheering on the impending catastrophe.

I was going to post this 3D mockup as a submission, but it's so irrelevant to furry on its own that I couldn't excuse it - here, though, is a preview of what I've been working on recently...

http://ironk.byethost13.com/ccpromo.jpg

It's rough and I meant to carry on with it, but some computer-melting made that impossible for the time being. However, I'm going to upload something else to do with this very soon - I think that you can just about tell the idea of what's going to be happening from the picture and the fact that it's me posting it :)

I found a few episodes of the UK Fun House when trawling Youtube for TV memories - I didn't tend to actually watch it when I was growing up, but I remember seeing a couple of episodes. What I'd forgotten about was that in our version, a lot of the games involved them being dressed up as animals in what... well, basically amounted to fursuits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c8VZ7H5_7U#t=1m30s

90s television was incredible, looking back on it - you show this to children, they're inevitably going to get messed up in the head later on in life.

Frankly I'm in two minds whether I even want to draw attention to this again, but still - in the experiment I put out this morning, one side is unanimously in the lead on FA! If for some reason you feel particularly strongly either way or want to give her some chance of rescue, you've got until next week to put in your votes as to who you want to see get my stories' usual treatment. Who's it going to be?

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3211398

I've just remembered I've joined most of my watchlist this year in becoming a quarter century old, now.

I'd better hurry up with the four or so stories that I'm jumping between, because pretty soon I'll be past the minimum age where writing about college-age furry girls the way I do seems a bit creepy.

I've just realized that I'll be past a quarter century old in a couple of weeks... that's a thought that's intensely terrifying!

After a slight break I got some more writing done this morning, though not on any story that I'm supposed to be working on just now... I've still got about six to keep going.

As I have no drawing talent, I wanted to pass this on to anyone watching me:

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/957577/

I'm going to be looking forward to the results of this one!

After being knocked out by illness for at least a month, I now have eight hundred submissions in my inbox. I'd clear them but then I'd miss a pile of submissions from the artists that I enjoy watching - so today my aim is to plough through as many as my brain can stand and try to give feedback on everything I can (as I know that comments are artists' subsistence). If you've got a massive heap of comments from me today - that's why!
Ready? Go...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHOi9D1NlaA AAAAAAAAAAAAAH

I just searched for that on a whim after having a dream about it - someone's uploaded a bit of the show that turned me into... this, and brought it back to the world after I hadn't seen it for nearly twenty years.

The last obstacle course starts at around 7:00 - it's really weird seeing a game that I thought only existed now as a memory I'd put into IZ. I used to have to hide behind the sofa at the sound that was played when a wrong booth was chosen...

At the start of the week I was struck by a crazy inspiration to start quietly working on something that I thought up while half-asleep. I think it's just about ready to present now, so...

http://industrialzone.x10hosting.com/

From what I've seen the host's uptime is flaming terrible, so I hope that it exists when you click on that...

This is a site about Industrial Zone put up by its fictional TV station. I wanted to make it look as in-universe as possible, with the exception that all 'videos' are presented in text form.

I'll be tinkering with it for a while yet, but so far it acts as a dressed-up repository for my IZ-related writing, as well as background information about the fictional show. There's even a fan forum, looking a bit sparse (and badly styled) at the moment, with some posts from watchers of the show. But feel free to join in and interact with them :)

If you dig a little through the clips you'll also find a brand new IZ scene! I'll put it up here as well after a while.

Any comments, suggestions or submissions (?) are very welcome :D

IK

Edit: Much better host attained, http://ironk.byethost13.com/industrialzone/

I'm not sure how many other people who read this are writing TV-based stories just now, but I found this site when researching things for a chat-show type scenario that I'm working on at the moment. I was really looking for shots of the backstage rooms, which you can find under Production Accommodation, but has layouts and shots of the studios as well.

http://www.pinewoodgroup.com/gen/Television_Studios_Landing.aspx?intFacilityTypeId=11&folder=3

I found a couple of clips from Rally Planeten the other day - it was the Swedish version of the British 'Run the Risk', which was a sort of darker-themed Double Dare in the mid-90s. Most of its games were based around a large moat of gunge, with a positively sadistic final challenge that was the inspiration for the current form of my own fictional show, making them have to climb a slimy inflatable ramp leading down into the moat while even more of the stuff was poured down on to them from the ceiling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJxdf-Mtqv8 - Watch it to see some of the devious spirit that inspired me to create IZ :)

One year to the day when I started writing it... it's finally finished. And in the end, it was just under sixty-seven thousand words - larger than the first two episodes combined.

Now, on to part six... :)

Before I start, I should say that normally I really don't like this sort of thing because one of the reasons I love furry art and writing is because you're not dragging anyone who exists in the real world into your fantasy. And even though my writing... well, it doesn't portray women in the most positive light, it's quite important to me to always have this barrier between real and fictional. However, I admit I found myself looking through some pages of CollegeHumor's latest, er, "contest"... and found this entry.

http://www.collegehumor.com/hottestgirl/ashley

Scroll through the photos first, just to get an impression of who we're talking about. Then move your eye to the interview questions, until you see one that might be appropriate to the reason that you have me on your watch list. Look at her response!

Now it's even more criminal that things like that aren't on any more :)

It was a bit much expecting anything after last year. I even got a little excited when they announced that they'd be swinging Heidi Klum at a wall of slime-filled balloons bottom-first. And you'd think that there would be no way to possibly mess a situation like that up (no pun intended), but America managed it in ways that I never thought possible.

Fortunately I had a backup plan prepared for today. Take it as my idea of how to do this kind of thing properly. =)