http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....pySquirrel.jpg

That is all.

Holy fuckballs, can you believe the blatant favoritism around here?! Fine! I get it! You like fall! That doesn't automatically make every God-damned FA user an autumn fan. Or "Brotumns", or whatever the hell you call yourselves these days. I can't keep up with your stupid seasonal trends! It's bad enough we have Mother Nature trying to cram it down our throats every year; Now we're exposed to blatant autumnal propaganda every time we're online here?! Unconscionable!

This banner also illustrates your continuing campaign against bears, FA! You're obviously trying to trick them into hibernation early! There can be only one explanation: You hate bears! Racist!!

And have you spared a single thought for your registered users who, through no fault of their own, live in the southern hemisphere? This is their spring! I can picture them now, lost under the influence of your false banner. They bundle on layer upon layer of full body length Alpaca-wool underwear, and stumble out, numb and blind, into a scorching inferno. They curse your name with their last breath, writhing in heat stroke's death grip!

Don't even get me started on your gratuitous depiction of dead and dying leaves. Think of all the.. planties?

(seriously though, that's a very pretty banner)

So I got an email from Sony last night, offering me a link to delete my PSN account. I guess they sent this because I haven't done the latest system update yet and agreed to their insane terms. So what, Sony would rather not have customers than have customers who refuse to sign away their rights to collective bargaining? At this point, I'm tempted to oblige them.

Although Sony's inappropriate hubris following the hacking scandal is certainly a part of it, my disappointment with today's gaming industry goes way, way deeper. There's something fundamentally unsettling going on, both for console and PC. It has bugged me subtly and vaguely for a few years now, but lately it has become very obvious.

At the core of the problem is the mandatory online connectivity games have today. Yes, it brings the ability to push out patches that fix bugs, and it brings easy online multiplayer. But it also not only allows, but encorages, game makers to be lazy.

Why pay a team of testers to fully test your game? Your customers will find every obscure bug for you, and then you can fix them at your leisure!

Why complete your game on time? Release it at the target date weather it's done or not, and complete it in the patches. Or better yet, design your game to be incomplete on purpose, and sell the missing bits of it as DLC!

Why design a game to be challenging? There may be thousands of hardcore gamers, but there are millions of casual gamers!

We're paying more than ever for games now, and they're designed to be broken, incomplete, and boring.

Back in my day, when you bought a game, you were buying a game. You were buying a fixed collection of bits on a disc or a cartridge. The game had a beginning and an end. It had playability. It often even had replayability. It didn't try to punish you for buying it secondhand. You weren't doing dumb things just for the sake of earning achievements for your profile. It didn't demand to know your facebook password so it could spam your friends directly. It didn't fucking replace your system's DVD-ROM driver with a broken one for its DRM scheme.

Any form of enjoyable gameplay has also been left at the curb. Let's site a specific example. A few months ago I saw some tech demos for the game From Dust:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfKQCAxizrA
It showed a sprawling, dynamically changeable landscape with flowing rivers and lava. It promised a God sim where you could move mountains on a whim and build a vast empire for your followers. I was excited!! Somebody was finally going to a modern God sim, and do it right!

The game's out now. You play on sparse little islands. Your followers built pathetic huts on twiggy stilts that fall over when hit with a good gust of wind. You shift sand around, a few cubic meters at a time. You win a level by getting just five guys to the exit, a little hole in the ground, that's all that matters. Even on the final level, the "promised land of the Ancients", it's still rickety shacks that fall over, and getting five guys to the exit. The whole experience feels like the tutorial levels for an actual game, the early tutorial levels before the enemy is revealed.

Have we forgotten what makes a good God sim?! I want my followers to live in an unassailable golden temple/fortress overflowing with milk and honey! I want the unbelievers to die in agony from a dozen plauges and natural disasters at my fingertips! I want a level to be over when my people stand tall and victorious, and each and every enemy lies dead! Aaaagh! Rrrf! Nngh! *stomp stomp stomp*

If anybody needs me, I'll be playing old games in emulators.

So after nearly three years, FA admins have decided that my old icon -- which was originally approved by Dragoneer himself -- now violates the TOS. This happened sometime last week.

Now, I know from firsthand experience that being a community site administrator is a hard, thankless job. Except it's not even a job, seeing as there's no pay. Here you are, volunteering your own personal time for free, for the sake of a community that you love, and the only thing you get in return are irate users screaming bloody murder over every little thing you do.

But even with that in mind, this decision makes me angry every time I think about it. I just can't find the sense in it.

Is this about protecting those poor, innocent minors who browse the site with adult images turned off? Are silly icons of gyrating furries no longer acceptable on a furry site? You can do the Riverdance, but not the Hustle, is that it? Where's the line? Or, like that infamously vague ruling from the obscenity trials in the 60s, do you just "know it when you see it"?

Now, I'm not saying my icon wasn't suggestive; it certainly was. But it wasn't explicit, and it was funny, dammit. Since when is "suggestive" such a bad thing? What are we, Amish?

You can't whitewash sexuality out of furry. Sexual imagery is where the furry fandom began. It was there before the fursuiters, before the word "yiff", before the conventions and the MUCKs. It's right there at the core. The pulsating, gooey core.

I'm not trying to raise a huge stink here, or officially protest the decision, or anything like that. I'm just really not happy about it.

My hips were starting to get tired, anyway.

Some people commented on my decennial picture how my art seems to keep evolving even after all this time. This really means a lot to me, since it's something I strive for. Others noted that my artistic output has tapered off to almost nothing in recent years. Yes, that's very true, and I believe these two trends are closely related.

Behind all this is my greatest fear for myself as an artist, which can also be one of my biggest pet peeves about other artists. I've seen many artists hone their style to a point where they can get pleasing results quickly and repeatably, and then their style just completely stops evolving. Perhaps they get into comic work where a steady style is crucial; or maybe they start churning out commissions and have no time or motivation left for personal artistic growth. There are even a few artists (whom I shall not point out by name) who I've seen slide backwards -- they have a really dynamic and intriguing style as they develop, but once the art becomes their day job they fall back into a flat, boring style.

If you ask me, this is the line where artistry ends and craftsmanship begins.

There's plenty of pressure to cross that line. What's the first thing anyone says when you post a picture they really like? "MOAR!!!1!" More of the same, please. And there could even be good money to be made there. Make a name for yourself as a top artist in a particular fetish, and the fans of that fetish will gladly pay you well for personalized art (within limits; I doubt there's many hardcore Marmaduke axilism fetishists with disposable income out there [we can hope not, anyway]).

A few caveats:

First, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with making a living on furry porn or other sorts of art. There's certainly much worse ways to make a buck, and it's really none of my business anyway. I'm just saying that when an artist dead-stops improving when they reach marketability, it's a damn shame.

Second, I don't want it to sound like I consider the filthy porno I make to be proper capital-a Art. Let's not kid ourselves; I draw cartoon animals with dicks and titties. That said, it does express my thoughts on sex and sexuality to some degree, and after ten years it's hard to scrape new ideas from the bottom of that barrel.

Finally, I realize that this line between artistry and craftsmanship could just be all in my head, and my steadfast determination to stay on one side of this imaginary line is doing nothing but crippling my output. Maybe one day I'll learn to just draw furry porn and not get all poncey about it.

The beeps at the beginning of the Gorillaz song "Man Research":
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA84lcLxCi0

Is the noise made by the abductor robot in the Dr. Who episode "The Sontaran Experiment":
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVtaNp_y32U#t=54s

And in the episode, the Sontaran was conducting research to test the endurance limits of men. MAN RESEARCH.

You'll thank me when this information saves your life one day.

Who's been playing videogames instead of drawing? That's right, me!

Little Big Planet 2:
A massive improvement on the original. The level editor truly is the most sophisticated game construction kit I've ever seen that didn't involve actual coding. My chief complaint is a social one, in that all the top rated user-created levels are not works of originality, but clones of old popular games. If you've got an original level that you put days and days of work into (LIKE I DO), it's really hard to get attention for it short of begging on the Internet (like I am).

Pokemon Black/White:
I'm convinced that Musharna is the ultimate Pokemon. You whip one of those out in battle, and your opponent will scream "OH GOD it's some sort of giant floating aborted fetus" and while they're on the ground crying and retching, you can grab their wallet and run.

Cortex Command:
I got this 2D shooter with last year's Indie Humble Bundle, and I still play it every now and then to let off some steam. It's a very, very, VERY incomplete game, but it works as a completely chaotic sandbox. In this game, you can possess a robot, grab a 1920s-style Tommy gun, and kill spaceships. In other games, you can't. So this game is automatically better.

Sometimes you can't carry a scanner around with you. Maybe your scanner is too large. Maybe your scanner requires wall power. Maybe your scanner was one of those awesome slim glass-top ones but it started developing stuttering and streaking and you can't buy a new one anymore because all anybody makes nowadays are those huge horrible generic box scanners GOD DAMMIT YOU BEAUTIFUL BASTARD WHY DID YOU DIE ON ME ;_;

Sometimes you can't carry a scanner around with you. Those of you who saw me at FC may have seen me taking pictures of sketches with my camera, a Nikon D3000 (bottom-of-the-line SLR, I got it at the Costco). I've had a few people ask me how to get pictures of sketches taken with a camera to come out not all blurry and washed out. This is how I do it:

First, camera settings. Flash on, small aperture, short exposure. You want to use your flash so you won't need a tripod, and room light is usually not to be trusted. You want your aperture small so distance variation won't cause blur. You want your exposure a little on the short side so no part of the image gets completely washed out.

Next, arrangement. If your flash isn't external or indirect, you'll want to take your picture at a 20-30 degree angle, because both ink and pencil can reflect light harshly from head-on. You'll also want to make sure that nothing is casting a strong shadow on the page; Even with the flash on, these can show.

If all goes well, your picture should look something like this example photo of a sketch  argonvile put in my book:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-01.jpg

This picture makes a good example for this technique because there are large swaths of very light gray coloring throughout the picture that I want to preserve. If you try doing plain levels on it now, some of the light grays will wash out while other parts of the image are still too dark.

We load the image into Photoshop or some similar image editing program. We select the canvas and do free transform, nudging the corners (ctrl-click) until the page is completely rectangular (move it to the edges of the canvas to check for straightness), and also stretching the sides to get the correct aspect (it helps to hold up the original and compare). My example's transformation box looks like this:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-02.jpg

If properly transformed, you should be able to do a rectangular clip at the edges of the page and not get more than a few pixels worth of page edges, like so:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-03.jpg

The basic theory of what to do from here on out is to make a layer that represents the colors we'd see on a blank white page under identical lighting conditions. The difference between the fakey blank paper layer and the real photo layer should be just the image on the page.

To accomplish this, I first make a new layer and set its Fill to 0%, so it can be edited but not seen (you could also just put it behind the photo layer). Then I go in with a picker and pick the color at a place where the blank white page can be seen. I switch over to an airbrush tool and put down a large, soft patch of that color at the same place on the hidden layer.

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-04.jpg

I repeat this sample-and-airbrush process on other white areas around the page until I've covered all the real estate of the image to some degree. After this, my "blank page" layer looks something like this (transparency changed to red for effect):

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-05.jpg

I set up a macro to do "duplicate layer" followed by "merge down". I run this macro until no more transparency exists in the layer:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-06.jpg

So that completes our fakey blank paper layer. Keen eyes may be able to see that it's ever so slightly darker around the edges, especially in the upper left. That difference is subtle, but important! So now, if we take this paper layer, making sure it's fully opaque and above the photo layer, and set its blending mode to "Difference", we get this:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-07.jpg

Yeah, that's inverted. Easily fixed; Merge the layers together and then invert the whole thing again. Then we can use levels to do finishing adjustments. I tweak levels to trim just a hair off the bright end to account for noise, turning the paper pure white; and also trim off from the dark end enough that ink shows up as pure black. Like so:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....LR-Demo-08.jpg

So there you go! An off-kilter, under-exposed photo from an easily portable camera is transformed into a vivid scan-like image that can be presented online without shame (content aside). Our final product looks like this:

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....OnATuesday.jpg

So I'll be at Further Confusion next week, but for the first time ever I won't have a table in the dealer room there. I'll still be up for doing sketchbook shit, so look for me in the creator's lounge (or in other, less stanky areas where drawing is happening) and, of course, at the always popular and controversial Adult Moose Panel. I'll be the fat white guy in a T-shirt!

Let's say you put out a big bowl of assorted candy on Halloween with a sign that said:

CANDY UPGRADE STATION
For every good piece of candy you take,
Leave a piece of your worst candy.

Now let's assume everybody plays by the rules and doesn't take without giving. Let's also assume we're just talking about name-brand candy here, and disregard Halloween non-starters (apples, toothbrushes, etc). What sort of candy would you personally leave behind? What sort of candy do you think would be left in the bowl at the end of the night?

Personally, I'd ditch the Tootsie Rolls for just about anything else. Despite having a love of chocolate and massive sweet tooth, I've always found that gummy substance to be fundamentally disgusting. If given a tootsie pop, I'd suck the lollipop just until the core was breached, and then throw away the rest.

At the end of the night, though, I think you'd end up with a bowl of low-flavor chalky candies like Smarties (the American convex-lens shaped things, not the chocolate discs the rest of the world knows) and Necco Wafers. They're much higher on my personal candy totem than Tootsie, but I think they're more generally reviled.

In case any of you Flash guys are interested, I'm releasing the source to the document class I used to make my Depth-Of-Field thinger, along with a simple demo.

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuff/DOF.zip

A few journals back, I proclaimed that Frank Miller's The Spirit is The Worst Movie I've Ever Seen. A number of people urged that I go see this movie or that movie in hopes of crowning a new champion, as if I were asking people to help me actively seek out a more painful experience. I wasn't. Despite this, I have since seen two movies that could be contenders for the title.

A number of you nominated M. Night Shyamalan's "The Last Airbender". Being a huge fan of the show, I was actually excited for this movie from some of the initial stills and teasers, but avoided it when it hit the theaters due to the intensely bitter reaction from other fans. However, last night with friends, we were drinking, a copy was brought out... we really didn't have any choice but to watch it.

Airbender is not a good movie. You've heard the complaints before: The plot is cobbled together from a number of the first-season episodes, so there isn't so much a story arc as there is a series of story speed bumps. Everybody's names are mispronounced. They use voice-overs and montages to skip over plot development, and character development is completely gone. Momo and Apa are there, sometimes, but they don't really do anything. They aren't even referred to by name, but they'd probably just call them Moo-moo and Opah anyway.

It's my personal belief that Shamalamadingdong intentionally had the actors mispronounce all the names as revenge for everybody calling him Shamalamadingdong all the time. I, for one, do not plan to stop.

But Airbender critiques are a dime a dozen. Instead, let's talk about "Vegas in Space".

I found "Vegas in Space" on Netflix's online streaming service, under the "Similar To Babylon 5" category (incidentally, there actually is a space Vegas in the Babylon 5 universe, New Vegas on Mars). Not being one to pass up unheard-of crappy Sci-Fi, I fired it up.

So the titles start up, looking for all the world like a crappy VHS transfer, and actors' names start flashing by. Ginger Quest? Tippi? Miss X?! These sound like porn names. But Netflix doesn't have porno... Does it?

The movie starts. A group of manly(ish) space cadets, assigned to investigate a crisis on a girls-only pleasure colony, take sex-change pills. Transformed, they arrive at Vegas in Space, a city which looks suspiciously like a collection of perfume bottles. The plot is all building up to a big musical number.. Everybody seems to be a princess or a queen... They've all got overly elaborate dresses, slathered-on make-up, and big fake hair.....

Dear God, those weren't porn names. Those were drag names! I'm watching drag queens in space!!

There are no words to describe exactly where this movie goes from there. I can only say that it's campier than Camp McCamperson's 60's Batman Reenactment Camp, and gayer than a gaggle of furries at the Folsom Street Fair.

Digging deeper for information about this movie, I learn that the director/writer/lead actor (Philip Ford, AKA Doris Fish) poured eight years of his life and all his savings to pull this movie together by its frilly shoestrings, and died shortly thereafter.

In the end, no, neither of these movies came even close to topping The Spirit as the worst movie I've ever seen. Vegas in Space stands out clear and proud of what it is: a way, WAY over-the-top labor of love. And despite astoundingly poor execution, Airbender has some respect (or at least doesn't completely desecrate) the core concepts of the source material. I can't say the same of The Spirit.

Those of you that know me may know that I've been playing Civilization 4 regularly over the past several years. Of particular interest to me was the Fall From Heaven mod, which put the game into a fantasy realm with many interesting playable races: dwarves with a military and workforce primarily made of golems, dragon-worshiping sects, prancy tree-loving elves, mages, pirates, angels, demons, etc.

This was all well and good, but some chronic problems made me pine for something better. Multiplayer never seemed to be as stable in the mods as it was in vanilla Civ. A lot of the minor interface quirks (like snapping your attention away from important battles at the worst time) get really annoying after a lot of play.

So, I've been looking forward to Civilization 5, and I've hit it pretty hard since its release. So far, it seems like a pretty mixed bag.

INTERFACE:

The whole interface has been reworked. It is super, super slick. Events no longer yank your attention this way and that while you're trying to move your guys, they queue up in icons along the right to await your perusal. Unit orders are presented much more concisely. Build menus are now actually organized!

However, the interface has been simplified so much that they've discarded some genuinely useful things. The diplomatic screen that shows you at a glance who's at war with who is gone. The statistics chart, including the military power graph, is gone. I used to tell Civ 4 to play random songs from my MP3 collection, now I can't. Units with move orders no longer indicate where they plan to move to (and execute the move at the end of the turn, often leading to false turn changes).

STRATEGY:

There's two big changes to strategy this time: They've moved from squares to hexes, and now you're allowed to only have one military unit per tile. The hexes make for slightly more realistic movement, and tickle my inner nerd in just the right way. The single-unit rule does away with the infinitely huge stacks of death some players would use. Since you can't have a huge stack of armies in a city anymore, cities can now defend themselves directly, which makes a lot of sense.

The downside to the one-unit-per-tile rule is that it makes large military forces a pain to deal with, since each unit needs individual attention every turn. And where do you put them after a military campaign? AI players get super pissy if you station troops near their borders. And while cities can defend themselves, stationing a unit in a city doesn't add to its defense. Why not?!?

STRUCTURE:

The structure of a nation has been simplified a bit. Your nation's vital statistics are shown along the top of the screen, and explained when you hover over them. It's easier to figure out the trade network. You can no longer manually adjust the culture-research-money balance except by building targeted buildings, which makes sense on a strategic level to me.

But like the interface, the structure seems simplified too far in some areas. For example, happiness is now tracked on a national level, rather than per-city. This means a few unhappy cities can drag down everybody else. They've set up a system of puppet governments for recently conquered cities to compensate for their initial unhappiness. I understand why they did this, but I really preferred the old system for tracking happiness.

DRM:

Civ 5 is now activated online through Steam. There are some benefits to this, like an integrated friends list, and you get those silly achievements and all. The box claims that Steam is needed just for activation, and after that you can play single player offline.

But the box LIES! When you launch Civ 5, it doesn't start until Steam verifies your identity. I've been denied access to the game, a game on a physical disc that I own and want to play in single player mode, because the Steam servers were too busy. Steam cloud is not used at all, neither for saved games nor configuration.

MULTIPLAYER:

On the plus side, there is still an option for multiplayer.

But the actual multiplayer mode makes very little sense. Two people in different locations are going to see a completely different list of games in the multiplayer lobby. The lobby chat is gone. Private games can be set up, joined through the Steam interface, but I've never been able to advance the turn in a private game and stay connected. There does not seem to be an option to save multiplayer games, yet there's clearly an option to load them.

MODS:

There hasn't been enough time since the launch to call this one. They claim that mods are now easier to make, easier to install, and more stable. Hopefully we'll get a knock-out mod like Fall From Heaven, in time... although it probably won't actually be Fall From Heaven, as its team has announced that the next version of their game will be based on a game engine of their own design.

CONCLUSION:

This game has a lot of shiny, shiny polish. In many ways that's good. But in some areas it feels like the polish is too clean, almost clinical. In others, it feels like the polish is there to distract you from deeper defects. The defects in multiplayer glare right through the polish, but there's a good chance that these will be fixed with patches later on.

Last weekend, I saw Frank Miller's The Spirit. After much consideration, I've decided that this is, bar none, the worst movie I've ever seen.

How bad is it? Let me put it this way. I've been re-watching all (yes, ALL) of Mystery Science Theater 3000 recently, and this movie is much more actively bad than the worst monster schlock films they do. Most of the MST3K films are unquestionably bad, but their worst sin is usually being far too slow-moving -- a single, simple monster concept stretched to take up an hour and a half of film time. They just don't hit with the egregious full force that The Spirit does, trying to gouge out your eyeballs and poison your brain at every turn.

Let me put it another way. When I watch a movie perform a sin against cinematography, I sigh. This is reflexive, it's not something I do on purpose. There were points in this film when these attacks came in such rapid succession that I physically ran out of breath to sigh with.

So what's so bad about The Spirit? I'm glad you asked!

First off, the writing. This movie reads like it was written by a prepubescent boy, like Axe Cop. But unlike Axe Cop, which revels in its own nonsensical surrealism, The Spirit stamps its little feet and demands to be taken seriously. It's alternately HUGELY campy (campier than Adam West Batman), and trying to be dark and edgy (showing bloody caved-in heads and such). The two just don't mix.

The hero also seems to have hypnotic control over women. Every woman in the movie, including mistresses under the arch-villain's control, can be seduced by The Spirit when he whispers four words into their ear (presumably "I have a penis"). The panties drop so fast I'm amazed their shins don't break. This would have at least some plausibility if the lead was charming or handsome, rather than the ham-fisted ball of blandness that he is.

Then, there's the acting. Sam Jackson is here, camping it up as The Spirit's arch-villain The Octopus, which is actually enjoyable on some level. At least until he decides to put on his Nazi uniform, where it just goes bizarro. Almost everyone else is Green Screen acting here -- they're not quite sure what to emote because they don't have a clear idea what's going on. Everyone, that is, except Stana Katic as Morgenstern, who belts out her lines at the top of her lungs, as if she was the junior drama club member with something to prove in a high school play. Genuinely cringe-inducing, every time.

And then there's the plot. The Spirit is a man who was a cop, was shot to death, and came back to life and took up the vigilante lifestyle allied with the chief of police. Okay, very Batman. Towards the end of the movie, it is revealed that The Octopus developed a serum that could resurrect the dead and give a person permanent healing super-powers. But because he didn't want to test it on himself, he tests it on this cop that just died. Really? REALLY?!?! You're an evil genius about to give somebody super-powers, and you chose a cop?! A COP over, say, a henchman, or a bit criminal, or just some random guy?

He's not the only person doing inexplicable things. The police let The Spirit just commandeer their vehicles at will? A villaness photocopies her butt and leaves it at the crime scene?! A black market antique arts dealer sells The Golden Fleece and throws in the Blood of Heracles for free?!??!??!!

Then there's even disrespect to the source material. I'm no fan of the original comic, but they didn't even try to stay in the same world. The Spirit isn't supposed to have super-powers. The Octopus is never supposed to be seen without his mask. These are basic elements! Without these, it is not The Spirit!

The only way I can feel at all good about this movie is that it was rented it from Netflix, so I haven't spent one red cent on it directly.

Oh yeah, spoiler alert. This journal contained major plot spoilers. If my spoilers made you end up not see The Spirit, you're welcome.

http://video.adultswim.com/the-vent.....5-trailer.html

Hooooo-leeee crap!

After reading up on the differences of TN versus IPS style LCD displays, I bought a new monitor. It's an HP 24" IPS. Generally, TN LCDs are cheaper and have high refresh rates, while IPS LCDs have excellent color reproduction (that's essential to digital drawing) and really wide viewing angles. I'm stumbling a bit with it (bigger monitor, so I need to retrain my wacom hand) but I'm hoping it'll get me coloring more stuff.

Also I'm fairly excited about a couple of concerts coming up that I'm going to, namely Weird Al (whom I've never seen live before, but I hear he's amazing) and They Might Be Giants. Happy, nerdy times are upon us.

Finally, check out this tiniest of Chowder figurines that Guppy gave me:
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....inyChowder.jpg
Seriously, the whole thing is under an inch tall. And apparently, my keyboard needs dusting.

You know, FA coders, if you append like a "?v=2" to the end of the stylesheet reference links in the HTML, and increment the number each time you make a change, nobody would need to shift-reload to see the style changes. Sames goes for JS, images and other includes, too. AND it would all still cache efficiently! Not making your users do legwork? It's a good thing!

I'm very glad there isn't a tiny left side column anymore. But now the page starts like halfway down the page. Those menus up there could look better, be more functional, and be more compact all at once. The whole header doesn't need to be taller than just the title image.

And those ads. First thing on the user page? How about between the user info and the features/journals? You know, give us a taste of content before hitting us with the spam, at least.

I got some things to share that may not jive with the upload TOS, so here they are:

Here's a NaniMoose and a NaniMobile I made in PS3 ModNation Racers:
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....MNR-Nani-1.jpg
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....MNR-Nani-2.jpg
(there's better antlers but I haven't unlocked them yet)

Also I figured I should do one of those moodboard things, so you can get a terrifying peek into the dark pits of my soul:
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuff/Moodboard.jpg

Wow, everything on there is either uselessly silly or hopelessly nerdy. Plus I got as far as I cared to and then filled the rest up with Fifis and Birdoes. That means I'm awesome!

No, I won't identify any of the squares for you. But identify one of the obscure ones correctly, and I may tell you its significance.

I made a me for 3D Dot Game Heroes.

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....DDH-Nani-1.jpg
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....DDH-Nani-2.jpg

And then I put a pixel boner on him.

http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....DDH-Nani-3.jpg
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....DDH-Nani-4.jpg
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....DDH-Nani-5.jpg

That is all.

Edit: That's not all. Here is the save data for these two sprite sets:
Without boner: http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....DDH-Moosey.zip
With boner: http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuf.....ooseyBoner.zip

Using the hook shot with the boner set is good for hours of fun.

As a web developer by trade, I've got a few things to say about the whole HTML5 vs Flash debate that Apple is stirring up.

First of all, way to bite the hand that fed you, Apple. Where would Apple be today if it weren't for Adobe? There was a time (the late 90's) where if you were any sort of graphic designer, and you suggested NOT using Adobe software on Apple computers to do your work, you would simply be laughed out of the room by the other designers, their berets tilting limply on their heads.

On to the meat of the argument:

The biggest argument against Flash is that it's "not open" and everyone should use H.264 for video instead. But two things. One, Flash video often IS in H.264, and B, H.264 is not open either. It's patented by the MPEG-LA consortium. You need to buy a license to use it in any commercial sense.

This is already causing a rift in HTML5 video land. Firefox, being a free open-source product, cannot include the patented H.264 codec. They're pushing the open-source video codec Ogg Theora instead, but that's currently under investigation for possible patent infringements against MPEG-4 (it also has a terribly silly name). Google is also messing up the mix, as they've bought video codec company On2 and are rumored to be open-sourcing On2's VP8 codec for an HTML5 push lead by Chrome. And Microsoft Internet Explorer (which, believe it or not, still has a massive market share) doesn't support ANY of the above yet! This pot is still boiling, but the other kettle of fish is calling it black before its eggs hatch. Or something.

Does anyone remember what online video was like before Flash Video became mainstream via YouTube? Do you remember the pain of tracking down dozens of obscure video and audio codecs for every little thing? We're headed right back into that hell again if we aren't careful.

And I don't know if you've noticed, but Flash does more than video. Do you think mainstream Flash usage will go anywhere while Farmville is only playable in Flash? Your mom needs to tend to her crops every day, don't you know. (I'll tend to your mom's crop...)

Look, I agree that Flash is a lumbering beast of a plug-in that is often abused to do horrible, unspeakable things (use FlashBlock!). I agree that its days are going to be numbered when -- WHEN -- HTML5 is ready for prime time with near-global support and reasonable alternatives for the few useful things that Flash does. That time is not now.

So why is Apple trying so desperately to force this transition early? Let's go through their stated reasons. It's not about battery use (iPhones still get hot and drain battery when they play native H.264 videos, go ahead and try it). It's not about inefficiency (Ask anyone who remembers Real Media what true inefficiency was). It's not about stability ("Apples Never Crash" has always been a myth). It's certainly not about openness (we're talking about a computer company that used to put custom cable ports on its computers to prevent people from buying 3rd party keyboards and mice). No, it's all about money.

Apple is dead set about not allowing Flash to be ported to the iPhone/iPad simply because many of the most popular iStore sellers are games that are available online as embedded Flash (either originally or a reasonable facsimile thereof). They want you to buy your little web games through the iStore, and not to play them in your mobile web browser. Apple wants to get a slice of the pie.

Just like how they won't sell a computer with a Blu-Ray drive. You want high-definition video on your Mac? It's in the iStore. Apple gets a slice of the pie.

Just like how the iPad is nice and shiny but it doesn't really do much without apps. What's the one and only way to get apps onto an iPad? The iStore! Apple gets a slice of the pie every time. Soon they'll even get a slice of the pie from "free" apps, thanks to iAd.

So just remember -- and this goes not just for Apple but ANY megahuge technology company -- they aren't looking out for you, the user. They're looking out for their own bottom line.

If "Zounds" is short for "God's Wounds", doesn't it follow that "Zingers" is short for "God's Fingers"?

I was tempted to do that my-life-according-to-some-band meme. My band would be Electric 6, and my most faithful companion would be Naked Pictures Of Your Mother.

Speaking of your mother, I'm working on another picture featuring Raz and the tormented coon boy. It's far from finished, but here are some tits:
http://nanimoose.furryhome.com/stuff/tits.jpg

My journal is so very, very stale.. so here's some thoughts on some video games I've been playing.

Dragon Age Origins. I thought this game would be right up my alley, and a lot of people whose opinions I trust love this game, but I just can't seem to get into it. It's mostly the combat system that's bugging me. I was promised an intricate strategic experience, but I don't see any evidence of that in the early game. Sure, you can pause the game and fire off a spell or ability, but during the long recharge times you're left with the stupid old MMO standby of watching your guy and a monster run through their attack animation cycles while facing each other until one falls over. Lame lame lame lame LAME. There's no physicality to it. Sure, the story may be dynamic and engrossing, but if the game itself is no fun (and I don't see any evidence of that, either) why bother? Also, launch day DLC can go eat a dick.

Torchlight. It's an honest Diablo clone made by people who've made a lot of Diablo clones, and also Diablo. I haven't quite reached the end yet but it's been really solid, and it is ever so pretty. Some of the monsters are pretty damn smexy, too. My one complaint: the difficulty curve, at least for mages, seems a little unbalanced (too easy at the start, too hard near the end). The possibility of good mods for this game is promising. Good enough to tide me over until Diablo III comes out.

Demons' Souls. That physicality that's missing from Dragon Age? It's here. You can practically feel the weight of your weapons. The combat here is glorious, but the gameplay mechanics around player death are infuriating. The dedication required to get past any particular part of the game is both refreshing and truly painful.

Dwarf Fortress. Oh my God. This game has tunneled into my brain and refuses to leave. Don't let the ASCIIish graphics fool you -- this is an intricate civilization-building sim that plays out in deeper 3D than any game presented in actual 3D ever has. It's Dungeon Keeper plus Civilization plus Legos, as interpreted by Nethack. If you're trying to get into this game, look for the "complete and utter newby" tutorial on the web, because most other tutorials (including the in-game help) are absolute crap.

Hey folks!

Great to see a whole bunch of you peoples at FC again. Despite slow sales of CDs, this was the busiest I've ever been with sketchbooks! I grabbed scans of all the ones I did in the dealer room, so I'll be uploading my favorites from that to my scraps page here.

This con just generally had a weird feel to it. It was hard to find my usual hanging-out peeps after dealer room hours, a lot of my usual dealer neighbors either didn't have tables or weren't there at all, and absolutely everybody seemed to be feeling a pinch in the wallet..

Anyways, I may try to hit another con or two this year (prime suspects are Midwest Fur Fest and Califur). I'll keep all y'alls posted here.

So yep, I'll be there at Further Confusion, and I'll have a new Furry Artists Partnership CD for sale. Me and Guppy are manning table 45, right between Zaush/Kevoi and the dragon dildo people. Aside from the CDs, I'll be doing sketches and such.

So each year I organize a bunch of artists to put out a new CD of arts and stuff. This year's CD features Artdecade, Cobalt, D Bruin, Fel, Fennec (MobianFox here), Greenmonkey, Inuki, Kahmari, Kilcodo, Soro, and myself. My part contains full-resolution versions of this past year's art, plus a few unreleased finished pics and a buncha sketches. It's gonna be a good one!

Also, if anyone is coming into town that may be interested in adopting one of my two remaining unclaimed rosy boa babies, drop me a note... well if you're driving, at least. It's hard to get reliable information about taking these things on planes anymore, thank you very much, Mr. Jackson.

I've been having way too much fun with the level editor in Little Big Planet. I've published a few levels as "nMoose" on PSN:

* Bombardment - Escape a castle under siege by mortar fire before it gets you blowed up
* The Crystal Mine - A massive mining machine based on this German monstrosity: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/res.....0f2d3fd7_o.jpg
* Tank Run - An obstacle course for a tank with working treads, an idea I totally stole from Skant
* Chin Music - A fully functional fighting game

So yeah, go check 'em out, if you've got LBP. Shameless plug over! :D