i said i'd think about posting here again if it seemed like it was going to become stable and not do anything completely deranged again, and as far as i can tell things are looking Okay on here

transferring my backlog over will be contingent on "me feeling like doing that" so it may take a while for me to get around to it. but i'll at least start crossposting new stuff here

that said, FA does still have a stupid and arbitrary resolution limit on uploads, and manually resizing images for this site requires performing algebra for every image because they specified the limit in megapixels, like a psychopath might do. so stuff here is going to be lower resolution and probably auto-converted because who on earth has time to fuck around with "finding the side lengths of a rectangle with a fixed area and aspect ratio", and thus i still recommend downloading my stuff from my other galleries if you're going to do that. it's not like anyone will actually bother with this, but yknow. if you're one of the 6 people in the world who actually gives a shit about image quality, keep this in mind

because it does at least seem like current management gives some level of a shit about trying to fix the absolute goddamn disaster that played out for over a year with the 2.7 policy shit. also yknow, tag blacklisting wow! finally implementing some completely necessary features every other site has had for eons!

still very much have a chip on my shoulder about how many people were fucked over for no reason and how random chunks of this place's archive of furry art history were unceremoniously destroyed. a lot of those losses will never come back. they burned every scrap of good will i had left for this place and it's gonna take a lot to earn that trust back

but having redundancy is still a good thing so tell you what. if FA reaches the point where they don't need the panhandling link permanently at the top of the page, and by then they haven't had another staff meltdown or absurd ban/deletion wave or any other catastrophe like that, i'll consider the site stable enough to maybe think about posting here again

in the meantime though, reminder that my galleries now are on itaku and weasyl, relevant links to that and active socials are at https://linktr.ee/miradrgn


edit: this mf wrote "optomistic" and didn't notice for 2 months

With FA choosing to shoot itself in the foot one too many times even for me, a person who's been using the site since like 2007, I am moving my art presence elsewhere. My existing gallery will stay up (yknow, unless somebody gets a mod to delete/ban my gallery because kobolds are ""too childlike"" or w/e) but no future art will be posted here!

To see my art from now on, go to:

Weasyl (which has the most complete extant archive of all the art i've publicly posted online, including stuff from before I made this FA page)

-or-

Itaku (only has select excerpts of my older work, but all new art going forward will be posted here as well)

At some point I plan to make a personal gallery site as well, so that the existence of my work isn't dependent on other platforms that could collapse whenever they feel like it. If I ever do get around to that someday I'll post that link here too.


For non-art-related social media presence things are a little more dicey with twitter rapidly crumbling and all the alternatives having their own unique flaws. But your best bet currently is cohost. My twitter is also still... extant, but i rarely use main these days

assuming that FA doesn't back out of their latest completely boneheaded decision i have to figure that due to my gallery containing both pokemon AND kobold porn, those posts and/or my account will be under some mod's crosshairs at some point or another

even if my stuff happens to make it through unscathed, i am actually just sick to death of defending and giving benefit of the doubt to a website that continues to do nothing but fuck up and make the site worse year after year, while the last necessary usability feature they implemented was bringing back search like a decade+ ago. i've been insanely busy this month so i don't have the mental bandwidth to figure out exactly what i'm gonna do wrt migrating my gallery just yet, but once i have figured out what place(s) i'll be moving my art to, i will post more about it here if i'm still able to, as well as to my twitter accounts and cohost. feel free to mention in the comments what other gallery sites any of y'all use, it might help me better figure out what options are worth investing effort into

FA is unfortunately still the biggest archive of furry art history that exists which is the one thing that has made me keep clinging to it and hoping they'd ever bother to make anything about it better, but now that they're implementing a policy that will subject huge chunks of it to arbitrary deletion based on the whims of whichever mod is implementing the "i know it when i see it" rule that day, it's clear that the current management will never give one single fraction of a shit about doing anything but making the site worse

we as a community have GOT to figure out a tag for that reptile-style butt/hip configuration you see on stuff like dragon pokemon a lot, where there's still distinct thighs and/or cheeks but there's also a notable space in the middle instead of the cheeks touching together. like (all of these links are NSFW obv) this, this, this, this, this, this, this, or this

"monobutt" seems insufficient because that's very much spun off into its own whole distinct kink where the entire rear section's just one big orb, and it's not a tag that anyone actually uses for this kind of butt anyway. the dragon-style spread-hip wide butt is its own crucial niche but it's completely impossible to adequately search for and that's an absolute travesty. throw some ideas out here, there's gotta be some good name we can come up with for this kinda thing, which will probably never catch on broadly but fuckin, i'll use it at least

very funny of FA to shoot themselves in the foot right after my last journal being like "don't worry guys i'm not going anywhere"

FA has had 3 things going for it for years now: the largest userbase thanks to inertia, no algorithm, and the ability to post original-quality/resolution images (albeit via a janky exploit) so naturally they decided to go ahead and knock out one of those pillars out of the blue and tout it as an upgrade no less. and the monumental lack of self-awareness to dedicate half the announcement to "hehe here's our funny parody blue checkmark feature where you can pay money for something that does nothing! :)" while simultaneously making it so now you have to pay money to still have reduced functionality compared to before (4k limit vs No Resolution Limit Whatsoever) is, honestly comedy gold

as a heads up to FA's staff though: people will be much more willing to pay you guys money if you implement fucking a single one of the basic features that this site has been lacking for the last decade or more (i.e. content filtering/blacklisting, blocking that fuckin does anything, custom thumbnails, better support for non-image media, etc) rather than making an existing feature worse and charging money for it. going "now resolution is capped, for literally no reason since there's already a filesize limit!" while search is still borderline unusable because there's no way to filter out low-effort sfm/mspaint shit or tags/artists you don't want to see is a real slap in the face

i'll still be posting here for the time being but i am gonna look into other options that are better for publicly archiving original quality work. (and maybe like, have custom thumbnails and multi-image submissions so i don't have to have a dropbox link in the description for every image with kink alts!) itaku seems kinda promising but atm it seems to constantly be under intense load that makes the site impossible to use, and people have also been getting mad at them frequently for being weird about their maturity ratings. maybe 2023 will be the year of returning to weasyl lol. ultimately FA probably will still be the place most people see my stuff and even if i have links to originals in the description i know most people probably won't bother and will just download directly from FA, which frustrates me to no end!

honestly though i'm less worried about my own art, since i rarely post and have a very small following. i'm more concerned about the impact that any fuckup FA makes will have on its userbase. good artists have been slowly leaking away over the years, mainly retreating to places like twitter where art has a finite shelf life and gets crunched into jpeg dust, or telegram channels that aren't publicly accessible and also crumple your art up into a ball and dunk it in the toilet before delivering it to viewers, and every time FA manages to make things worse it's gonna be the last straw for more people. FA and twitter have been the main hubs for furry art for some years now, and with people still leaving the latter in droves and the former now choosing to make one of the more boneheaded decisions in a long proud legacy of boneheaded decisions, i worry the furry art world is gonna be sinking into a fragmented dark age where finding new content and keeping up with artists you like is going to be a whole lot more difficult

i'd like to hope that i'm wrong, and catastrophizing over nothing, but i guess time will tell. anyway i'm getting the hell offline for a while because the neverending torrent of shit in the online space this month is really wearing down my sanity lol

I don't know if this is finally gonna be the time that twitter actually comes crumbling down and becomes a ghost town, but I figured I'd address it here too.

Nothing's changing here, FA will continue being my primary art posting site for the forseeable future regardless of what happens elsewhere.

For general social media, I've made accounts on cohost and pillowfort. I haven't really touched either yet, but if the time really comes to pull the escape hatch hopefully those'll serve as a place to fall back to. And if other people actually join and at least one of them achieves some critical mass then maybe there will be some compelling reason to transition there.

I'm not a fortune teller, idunno if twitter's gonna die, if it does idunno if the social groups I've got there are gonna survive an exodus to other places, but all I can really do is prepare as best I can and see what happens. vOv

please be sure to enjoy it thoroughly

(no new art bc my drawing capability is too fickle to really bother trying to hit deadlines with Furry Kink Days. but the desire to draw stuff has been slowly welling up again lately so, who knows)

This hasn't come up too much so far, but I figure it's a good thing to address sooner rather than later.

I am, broadly, okay with my art being shared elsewhere, under the following conditions:
-You must link back to the original FA or Twitter submission.
-Uploading my work on aggregate art sharing websites like e621 or in Discord/Telegram art sharing channels is okay. Uploading to personal galleries like FA or Twitter without express permission is NOT allowed.
-When uploading my work, use the highest quality source file available - nearly everything I've posted has Dropbox links for the original resolution files.
--If uploading to Telegram, upload WITHOUT applying compression (use the "Drop images here" option and/or uncheck "Compress images"). If uploading as a compressed image is required for bots/etc, also upload an uncompressed copy if at all possible.
-Do not claim or imply authorship of my work.
-Do not edit, alter, remix, or utilize my work in part or in whole in any derivative work without first obtaining express permission. (Feel free to ask about it though, honestly I'd probably be flattered.)
-Do not use my work to make money without express permission.
-Do NOT use my work in any way associated with NFT, blockchain, or related technology. This includes tokens that contain a link to my work, tokens that contain any portion of data derived from my work, tokens containing any code that reproduces any portion of my work, etc.


Basically, drawing is not a financial incentive for me right now and I'm fine with my art being treated as a public good of sorts. However, I want authorship to still be easily traceable back to me and my galleries, and I want any distributed versions to be as close to original quality as possible. Twitter and Telegram are fucking horrible as art sharing platforms because they apply massive jpeg compression to everything, and it absolutely kills me when art gets downloaded from Twitter, compressed further by TG, and passes through another dozen hands until what's left is a pixelated mess with no way to figure out who created the original or where it's located. Because of how sharing things on the internet works, it's almost inevitable that that will happen eventually to work that gets shared around enough, but I want to do everything in my power to ensure the chain of quality and authorship stays unbroken as long as possible, and persists for the instances that get seen by the most people.

I'm still very much a small-time creator and have yet to have any major problems with any of this stuff, and I'd like to hope whatever audience I have is chill and understanding enough to keep it that way. At some point I might look into into applying a creative commons license to my art so I have something more legally bulletproof than a quick set of rules and guidelines, and hopefully that's as far as I ever have to go.

Oh, and if at any point you do see my art shared around in telegram channels or the like without attribution or in lower-than-original quality, kindly post a link to the submission or my gallery so people can know where it came from. And if you see anyone impersonating me, claiming authorship over my work, reposting my art to FA/twitter/etc. without permission, etc., report them if possible and let me know so I can get it addressed.

Anyway, that's all! Thanks for tuning into my... bi-yearly-ish journal posting.

the Situation on my art twitter is awkward because it's mostly porn there so if i ever want to post stuff that's Not Porn there's always this conundrum of "is me posting this next to a buncha porn gonna limit who's able to engage with it" and if it's like, fanart or something related toa small creator," is it gonna be chill for me to put this up next to a bunch of butthole pictures"

and twitter sucks ass and i already have too many accounts and i refuse to make another one so instead im trying... tumblr, the website i have not touched in 4 years. so if anybody still uses that place feel free to go follow https://miradrgn-art.tumblr.com/

realistically tho there won't be much impact here because FA is still what i wanna treat as my definitive gallery, since it is, somehow, one of the few remaining places on the internet where art you post will be preserved in its original quality and context and still findable in perpetuity. the internet's cool

ok that's all bye

nobody reads FA journals so this is really just for my own benefit lol

the past 6 months have been Extremely Fucked Up, both in the world at large and my own personal life, which isn't super conducive to getting a lot of creative work done, etc etc

i do have a number of things i've been working on recently, some horny, some purely self-indulgent stuff that nobody else will care about, some stuff relating to a broader project that probably won't actually go anywhere, so with any luck there'll be stuff for me to post fairly soon. not gonna make any guarantees tho, because one thing that's been hammered home for me of late is that art really only works for me when it's something i want to do for myself, and not an external obligation i feel like i *have* to do

in the meantime there are a small handful of unfinished sketches that i'll prob drop in scraps.. whenever i can be bothered

uhh that's about it! bye!!

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for an extended visit with some loved ones, so I'll be sparse online until mid-late November when I get back! I might wind up having the opportunity to draw some while I'm away, depending how things go, but we'll see.

Also, I'm gonna go ahead and delete the couple things I mentioned in the previous journal after I post this (see that one for details)


Oh, and in light of the good news this morning, everyone please break out all your strongest hexes and pagan rituals to help ensure the president succumbs to covid as soon as possible 💙✨

There are a small handful of very old sona development sketches and an outdated ref in my gallery that were all drawn by a former friend who I'm not on good terms with anymore, so I feel kinda Not Great having those in my gallery still. I know it can be frustrating when artists just randomly clear stuff out of their gallery tho, so I figured I'd at least give some heads up before doing so! At earliest I'll be deleting them in a week, but I am getting ready for an extended trip out of town soon, so I might wind up being so busy I forget til later.

I don't plan to make a habit of clearing stuff from my gallery often, I'm very pro-archival in general, so don't worry about this being a frequent thing, especially when it comes to art I've actually drawn myself!

so it's been a lot longer than i would've liked since i posted anything. there's unfortunately been a lot of stuff getting in the way, from the normal stress and anxiety and isolation everyone's been going through for the past several months (which have lasted several decades), to my own particular big stressors and important deadlines with major life things, to my physical health being so shit that when i DO manage to get myself to draw i get maybe an hour before my neck feels ready to snap off!

fortunately at least *some* of those things are getting closer to some kind of progress or resolution, and i have a new desk setup that should hopefully make it easier to draw for longer without Dying. i've got a bunch of stuff i've been wanting to draw, and one over-ambitious piece i've been chipping away at for weeks, so hopefully soon i can start actually making, finishing, and putting out some art again

also was planning to open up for commissions again last month but all this mess wound up setting back my ability to do that, but! soon!! hopefully!!!


_{(this does also mean that unfortunately i'm not gonna be able to upload anything for hyperscat day this year 😔 gonna have to hold it in til later i guess..)}

i've been quiet on here for a while because prolonged life stress kind of drained any willpower to draw out of me, and now im in a place where stuff is once again stable enough that drawing feels like something feasible again but i've been putting it off because im gonna be able to upgrade my pc... Soon™ and blah blah i am lazy

but given the state of things right now i wanted to at least make sure it's clear for the people following me here and not on twitter:
black lives matter, defund police, don't rest until we live in a world where we don't have to learn the names of black human beings only after they've been murdered in cold blood by the arm of the state

there are plenty of ways to help out even if you can't join the protests directly, here's a starting point with plenty of resources, orgs that need donations, etc: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/



and if you're upset that people are talking about this everywhere and you can't get away from it, consider how every black american spends every day unable to get away from the fact that at any time the police could decide to murder them for no reason and walk away with no repercussions

if you're upset about "riots, looting, and violence" consider the violence black americans face daily, on both direct physical and systemic levels, consider why you're more perturbed by some smashed windows at a target than you are about the loss of human lives, and also take the time to find footage from the protests, filmed by protesters, to see the countless instances of police firing rubber bullets, tear gas, concussion grenades, firehoses, on crowds of completely peaceful innocent protesters, cops restraining, beating, groping, macing unarmed innocents, often people who aren't even involved in the protests at all, the recorded footage of cops smashing their own cars, storefronts, etc so that they can turn around and blame it on protesters. look at that and ask who's instigating violence

and if you're upset because you think cops murdering black people is good or that they've brought it on themselves or whatever then fuck off lol, my art isn't for you

I'm opening up for a couple commission slots, to test the waters and see if it feels like something I could viably do more in the future!
These slots will be for single-character lineart pieces, at a discounted price of $35

For full info and submission form, go to: https://forms.gle/KiNoUThxQXXLzV6K7

EDIT: Closed and slots filled!

just... make custom thumbnails work again im begging you.... add back this literally basic functionality that you had years ago and got rid of and that everyone has wanted back ever since...... make it possible to upload weird kink art without every watcher being immediately fully blasted with it...... i fuckin beg of u

Just set up a new twitter for posting art, there's not much there yet but I plan to put up all my existing and new stuff, and I may post smaller sketches and doodles that I don't feel warrant an upload over here, so be sure to go check it out if you're on twitter!

https://twitter.com/ragged_lady

There's also an alt account for those of you brave and discerning scat-likers out there:

https://twitter.com/drakondia_

Unfortunately no new art today because messed up arms + bein real busy have kept me from drawing for a minute here, but I WILL shamelessly bump this 3-parter since the final part was meant to be my hyperscat day submission anyway:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Stay safe out there kids, make sure to get lots of fiber.