I think the new Cyberpunk 2077 game has generally been great. I especially like the different choices and replayability aspect depending on what character type you go with. The level of thoughtful detail is also wonderful for world building. The different paths to accomplish goals thing has been sorely lacking in a lot of past RPGs, which is why people remember stuff like the Vampire Bloodlines game so fondly.

It feels a little odd playing this at a time when at least some of the cyberpunk ideas have actually started to come to pass, from VR to self driving cars. The future is now. I was amused when a game streamer I watch responded to the early in-story VR section with "Oh, cool, I like VR." referring so casually to their enthusiasm for actual VR in real life. For some of us who were waiting for VR since reading the old cyberpunk stories of old back during childhood, seeing stuff like today's kids responding that way to the concept, as if it was something taken for granted, is really funny.

It's also interesting how we have come such a long way since the media responded with headlines about the evils of "full frontal nudity" in a presumed kids game when the first Mass Effect game had mild nudity during love scenes, and the creators responded by censoring future titles in the series. Now this game comes out, with actual full frontal included, and hardly anyone cares, and Twitch even allows it to be streamed uncensored.

That said, some of the reviewers and game streamers I have observed playing it have mentioned that some of the characters sound like they are trying a bit too hard to be a kid's idea of what would be cool at times, which I sort of agree with, though I don't think it's a huge problem, as cinema-speak is pretty common in most media storytelling.

I think the larger problem with the dialogue is that there's a lot of telling rather than showing. Characters make pronouncements about themselves that don't feel very real. Granted, there are some efficient moments of exposition that were necessary, but when characters straight up tell you things about themselves rather than letting you discover them through their overall tone and actions, it feels as if the game writers don't trust the players to intuit things about the story, despite the game being obviously intended for an adult customer.

I think they should have trusted the audience a bit more. I mean, come now, I think we can figure out that the guy who has been described as a loan shark is a shady and cold character without him literally announcing for us that he is "All about the biz."

So, with VR finally upon us, is everyone becoming addicted and neglecting real life, like in the scary sci-fi stories writers have been giving us since at least the 1940's, such as Ray Bradbury's The Veldt? Not exactly.

While some use their virtual reality gear to enjoy VR enabled games like Elite Dangerous, Radial-G, and Alien Isolation on a regular basis (all available on Steam), others go on a VR gaming binge when they first get such equipment, and then watch their headsets collect dust as none of the currently available games kept their interest. But they wanted more VR experiences than a few games only recently altered to be compatible with VR, and the newer games made for VR from the ground up won't be out for months. What do?!?

I suggest remembering that VR doesn't have to just be about games. VR can provide all kinds of experiences. Frustratingly, many reviewers insist on calling any and all applications that you can run in VR "games", as if there is no distinction between experiences and games, just because a creation is rendered in VR.

Like life, VR can often be what you make of it, whether it's a relaxing ride from a balloon high in the sky during a rainstorm - https://share.oculus.com/app/therap.....ion-expereince

Or a horrific trip through the experience of being assaulted by terrible monsters, as in this demo out of Malaysia that the developers must have made to torture their enemies - https://www.wearvr.com/apps/dreadeye

Or one could experience strange new worlds through fractal art creations, as in the 360 degree, and sometimes in stereoscopic 3D, videos of Julius Horsthuis - http://www.julius-horsthuis.com/vr-projects/

And there's the developing Waifuverse coming from Japan for the especially lonely among us, full of young school girls for users to moles-, err, get to know better, as in the Summer Lesson demo from Bandai-Namco - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E_WEgUDdYg

Could all this innocent fun lead to the usual alarming news stories and congressional scrutiny that exploitable hysteria over all new technology seems to help bring about?

Well, maybe not this time. While Oculus has left their version of the concept an open platform, having publicly stated that all development will be allowed regardless of subject matter, they have also been very careful to have a zero tolerance policy for overtly porny or controversial creations on their marketplace, just as Steam already does in their marketplace.

Steam will no doubt be the market Valve will setup for use with the HTC Vive which will be released around the same time as the Oculus Rift during the first quarter of the coming year. Meanwhile, the Summer Lesson demo was developed for Sony's PS4 based headset. That's alot of VR options suddenly on the scene, but they are all tethered to official content that will be censored, which should help keep governments and interest groups happy.

So, without direct support for, um, questionable content by HMD manufacturers, in order for congress critters to argue that VR must be regulated into oblivion, they would have to make a pretty broad argument against the gaming industry as a whole all over again, which they already did and therefore probably can't get as much mileage out of it yet another time.

With any luck, we can avoid the 60 Minutes segment on the dangers of VR, or the Fox News story on how VR will corrupt da childrens, or the congressional testimony by industry leaders ahead of new regulations that the Supreme Court will then need to debate before striking them down, such as happened when the Internet, as a public consumer platform, was new and they tried to pass the Communications Decency Act. People will see that the sky is not falling, and VR only offers potentially mind expanding and useful or fun experiences for so many, as an innocuous consumer product and nothing more.

But now, please excuse me while I pause for a strange interlude:

Just between you and me, VR has been a long time coming and actually does have the potential to skullfuck everyone. In its most impressive moments, it's that awesome and really could change everything. The involuntary reactions it can evoke from mind and body are really something, and we have only just started exploring the potential of it all.

VR was first funded by the Defense Department and the CIA, leading to the development of the first head mounted displays at MIT during the 1960's. They were so heavy that they had to be suspended from wires to be usable, but they still experimented with them all those decades ago.

Think about that for a moment. While the VR skeptics complain that VR is a mere fad, no different from the passing hype for 3D monitors we recently experienced, that will distract from better vidya game development, that's how long this has been coming, and with the push largely coming from agents of the government. Somehow, I don't think the government was thinking of games when they threw money at the concept nearly fifty years ago.

Yet games and military simulations have been linked for a while. The army approached Atari about one of their games in hopes of using it for tank simulations, with prototypes being developed for them by Atari. And the US Army uses a computer game to help promote enlistment to this day. The military-industrial complex has been deeply involved in simulation development with a concentration on military vehicles. As such, many of the early VR researchers were either government workers or contractors at one point or another in their careers.

This is why Sega worked with military contractor Lockheed Martin on some of their arcade hardware, because Lockheed had already been funded for the development of more advanced 3D through the military applications. Meanwhile, Valve, Google, and other corporations have had VR and augmented reality plans in place for decades, as revealed by various memos coming to light, cause they knew it would come about as a consumer option, it was just a question of when the remaining problems of realizing VR in the home would be solved, not whether or not it would happen.

Oculus just pushed the timetable ahead further than expected thanks to crowdfunding of a project, but it was always part of The Plan for many companies and governments. Anyone who still thinks that all these governments and companies have been dumping billions into VR just for giggles and games has not been paying attention. So, while we argue on-line about games, porn and VR consumer apps, the Powers That Be have had their own ideas about VR all along since before most of the people arguing were even born.

But I did not say this. I am not here. VR is just a harmlessly amusing toy for consumers to use to play VR Candy Crush that you need not be concerned about.

End of Interlude

If we can get past the hype, fears and potential hysteria about VR and its implications, we could all enjoy Angry Birds in VR in the future. But more importantly, alternative experiences that could be breathtaking and thought provoking, without the mechanics of a game, could increasingly be available as well.

For example, one of the apps available on Oculus Share includes a simulation of what it was like to be in the World Trade Center when it was destroyed on 9/11. Just think, this could open up possibilities in disaster tourism not previously imagined.

We could experience first hand what it was like to burn alive during the Hindenburg Disaster, or sink with the Titanic (Actually, a detailed Titanic simulator is already in development for VR. Try the demo! - http://www.titanichg.com/), or be swept away by a tsunami in Japan. I recall surviving roughly over 30 earthquakes in a single week during my time in Central America some years back, and I would love to be able to share that experience with others with fewer quakes in their backgrounds as, believe me, it really is quite mind expanding.

VR has so much potential beyond games, so seeing mostly gamers with an interest in it and leading the arguments about it is kind of disappointing, even though I do love games, as I suspect that people don't see the forest for the trees. But I think we will quickly move past this stage of VR's development, and soon enter a brave new world of exciting experiences that VR will make possible.

Rave

I have generally been an FA loyalist over the years. But the most recent developments on the site have given even me pause. The sale to a new owner doesn't have to be a bad thing if new resources are opened and the site can become profitable. But we were told that the site's management would remain consistent, only to already be seeing changes from the original mission statement and intentions we have been told about in the past.

For example, in the most recent changes to policy, both post flooding restrictions and personal photo restrictions were, in most cases, removed, with the spin being that these were "artificial" limits on posting, as if there had never been any reason or reasoning behind their use. On the positive side, this may indicate that server space is now the least of the site's worries. On the negative side, this deviation from the original owner's clearly stated goal of keeping the place an art site seems to be driven by the same pressure to get bigger and more profitable on the Web that has resulted in creepy looking scam ads being posted to even the most otherwise serious and respectable news sites. It's just very hard to believe that change was driven by the original team's intentions for the site rather than that of the new owners. While the site does not seem to be in immediate danger of turning into MyFace for Furries, due to the culture here already being centered around art, knowing that it could, and that the new owners would seemingly welcome that, is unsettling.

Meanwhile, I am seeing features on site's like Weasyl that I have long wanted here on FA, such as improved thumbnails, being implemented. As such, I feel like the time to branch out to Weasyl, and perhaps other sites as well, is finally here. I don't intend to leave FA, and I kind of regret feeling the need to spread my work around beyond a core site that used to fill my art posting needs pretty well on its own. But, like so many others here, I now have to be prepared for the worst by branching out to other furry themed sites as well.

I'm trying to see the positive side to this, perhaps seeing it as an opportunity to try new art approaches on other sites or something. But it's mostly just sad to see how things have turned out here. I can remember when FA was a very focused point of interest for furry art seekers. But lately, alternatives have started to take eyes away from the site as it is, and viewership is generally down, even for some top artists. These shifts on how people seek art on the Web are not the fault of site policy, but policy may not be helping matters in the future if what I am seeing is setting the tone.

I still love the community on FA and want to continue to be a part of it. But the time has come to be open to alternatives and try new things. I hope, in the cases where you find yourself in the same parts of the web, you may find time to see my art in those places as well, and continue to share thoughts and works related to art here and there. See you around.

Rave

Please stop dying. Staaahhhppp iiiittt!

With the exception of Doug Winger, most of you aren't even close to retirement age yet, yet you are dropping like flies. There is no excuse for this, so just stop it already.

Thank you.

As for the rest of you, RIP, and thanks for all the art and comics. Most of you didn't do anything wrong. You just had a creative impulse that happened to express itself through furry art. Visual art especially is never more dignified by its subject matter alone, so drawing humans would not have made your work automatically more worthwhile, contrary to popular belief. No matter what anyone says, you didn't ruin anything.

And by the way, I know that some of you, like Hardiman for example, expressed the idea that your silly comics and moments of humor had not been a proper evolution of your work or as worthwhile an exercise. I respectfully disagree. Making us laugh with your wacky furry characters was as wonderful a gift as you could ever have hoped to give, and wherever you are, you should never regret having done that.

Rave

I pretty much turned off the news from Friday to Monday so I could enjoy a long weekend. So I was surprised by the news of yet another mass killing, and yet another manifesto written and left for us to read by the killer, when I tuned in again on Tuesday.

As I read through the usual range of news stories, comments sections, and editorials, to try to see what direction the most recent discussion of such an event had inspired, I came across a lot of loud, edgy and political responses that felt a lot like everyone just trying to attach whatever social cause they wanted to apply to the killings. Disturbingly, proponents of saying one thing or another issue was what the murders were "about" were competing with each other, each claiming the other was taking away important attention from their supposedly more important cause that they were relating the killings to.

The killer used guns for some of the killings, so the matter was "about" gun control, according to some, while others pointed to the killer's misogynist video rants and said it was all about "rape culture", and still others pointed to the racist rantings in the killer's manifesto and the fact that half of his victims were minorities and brought up the subject of race. Finally, some argued it was about the mistaken notions of the men's rights movement, or perhaps the pickup artists, or maybe the misogynist views sometimes found in "geek culture"... so many cultures so little time. Everyone had a shouty political ax to grind and were eager to tell us that this subject was what it was all about.

There is not necessarily anything wrong with using an event as a discussion starter. Many writers do it all the time, and I can certainly understand the impulse. But it was striking how many issues this one event brought up thanks to the variety of ugly hangups the killer seemed to have. He really did have some views related to sexism and racist feelings, a sense of entitlement, and a privileged background.

Oh, so much ammunition for today's political blogging! But when you actually take a longer look at the killer's manifesto, you see that nothing was as simple as one political angle or a single headline. Was he a privileged rich white kid of Hollywood with a wealthy director father? Well, actually he was of mixed race and, though he did grow up arguably spoiled, both his parents had hit on relatively rough times and he did not seem to think he would be taken care of forever. Was he another neglected person with mental illness? He had several counselors. Was he a gun nut? He found a twisted sense of empowerment through guns, but only in the last months of his life, and killed half his victims with a knife. Was he an abusive male symbolic of typical harassers with a sense of entitlement and hidden rape fantasies?

More like a hopeless geek who had never even approached a girl in his life, let alone harassed one. And his fantasies mostly involved consensual sex with cuddling in the afterglow, like many an inexperienced young person idealizing romantic action. (Though he certainly had quite a twisted sense of entitlement to a lot of things, love just being one of them. But not in quite the way some editorials are suggesting.) Was he even a victim of bullying, so we can talk about bully issues? Some former classmates, probably from his brief time in public high school, admit to having abused him. But he was only in that environment for a few months before moving to a more controlled part-time school where he didn't face open abuse. As for his earlier school days, most of his descriptions of "abuse" sound a bit delusional as his definition of abuse includes simply not being paid immediate attention to and such, and he weirdly inflates minor incidents.

There was much to disturb in the manifesto, from the ugliest racist assumptions to ravings about wanting to kill everyone. The incredible narcissism on display was ugly enough, and the final results just made it all the worse a read. But the glimpse of a sick mind it provided didn't fit one simple and politically convenient line of thought about the events. This was someone who was very disturbed since childhood. When we let him focus for us the whole of his problems on sexual or gender issues it's buying into the mad man's version of events, forgetting what an unreliable narrator he really is. If you read between the lines of his writing, you can see how he is even more twisted than he lets on, and that his problems went way beyond unfulfilled romantic longings. This is someone who was obsessed with status issues since grade school, well before adolescence even.

I dislike the way so many Internet discussions, including some of the ones about controversies involving Fur Affinity of late, have started to center around various labels, isms, and political band wagons, placing people in with us or against us camps and leading to attempts to label events and anyone you disagree with. Such struggles seem to reflect attempts to control the discussion through labels and name calling rather than honest considerations of events in all their complexity. Are you an apologist? A sexist? A racist? Pick one now before making whatever statement you have, cause that's what you will be called at some point. Then huddle around your choice of competing hashtags on twittter.

I don't mean to be an apologist for this murderer. His manifesto stinks of evil. But his sick self just doesn't make for a good poster kid for any of these issues people are yelling at each other about on-line. I want to write about some of these issues myself and don't mean to belittle their importance, but this is not the best springboard for those discussions.

This event was "about" the horror of getting stabbed to death only due to having unwittingly taken up residency with someone who turns out to be mentally ill. It's about the tragedy of young lives snuffed out for nothing more than having been by the road at the wrong time when someone troubled came along looking for a target to take misplaced rage out on. And yes, admittedly, maybe it's also, for the rest of us, about the uneasy feelings that recognizing parts of our own society in the killer's views gives us. But that doesn't make him the symbol of any of those problems, no matter how inconvenient that is for our political discussions.

Rave

As many of you have no doubt heard by now, Facebook has purchased the Oculus Rift startup, which was previously only crowd funded by Kickstarter backers who were mostly enthusiastic for the virtual reality system they were developing in terms of its potential in gaming. You can imagine how those backers felt when the company was purchased by Facebook and, suddenly, there was Zuckerberg talking about social and advertising possibilities for the technology, while making it sound like gaming was just a minor focus that the technology would merely start with. Let the Internet rage begin!

And begin it did. Many backers have been very vocal about their disappointment and at least one developer has backed out of supporting the technology due to Facebook's involvement. After backers had spent millions of dollars supporting the project, the 21 year old developer was happy to sell it to another twenty-something developer for billions of dollars (2 billion, mostly stock but with about 400 million in cash), with now no guarantees that the product's focus will even be gaming anymore. Gosh, I wonder why people might be upset about that?

It all makes me glad that I have never funded any Kickstarters. Some say that consumers should support what they want, instead of pirating everything and then whining about content anyway without ever contributing much. But should they? Stuff like this is big food for thought when considering donating to a crowdfunded project.

Some pundits have declared that the company did not owe its backers anything beyond any backer bonus goodies that were promised. But while this may be true in the legal sense, I think it's clear that there are some ethical issues raised by situations such as these in the realm of crowdfunding, even if project starters make good on delivering a dev kit or a t-shirt to backers.

For one thing, this project, and some others like it, initially advertise themselves as gaming related initiatives and draw their crowdfunding from enthusiasm over their potential for adding to gaming experiences. While I don't think most gamers expect VR to only ever be applied to games, most would still not have contributed funds to this product if they had known that it would turn into a Facebook social interaction and advertising platform. At a time when other crowdfunding products are generating enthusiasm through various very specific claims about what they will be about, this situation casts doubts on the whole concept of crowdfunding for critical thinkers. Yes, the backers should have known what they were getting into, but that's my point. It's time that the fuzziness in our thinking about things like Kickstarter gave way to grim realities about companies and profits.

And yes, Star Citizen, a project for making a next generation space combat simulator, that is being crowdfunded, does come to mind. This is particularly so because that project is doing two things that would make a buyout in this case an even more troubling development from an ethics related perspective - firstly it is openly advertising that is for PC., not consoles etc., with no involvement by a major corporation that might change the so far promised features or take it from the PC platform. And secondly, it is basing what features will be available in the game on how well certain funding goals are met, implying that those features will therefore someday be available to backers if they continue to throw money at the game's development. They have thus far raised over 40 million dollars through crowdfunding.

In the (hopefully) unlikely event that they sold out to a megacorp that then uses the game engine for different purposes, say, a dumbed down console port, and scraps many of the promised features, while pocketing a profit, it would be a bad situation after so many specific claims and promises being used to gain backers. Some may say that this will never happen in this case. But the point is - it could, and there is nothing protecting backers if it does, so long as they get whatever doodads the developer promised based on their donation tier.

Yes, I'm aware of Chris Roberts, their lead designer, promising to never, ever do what I am describing here, and to his credit, he has been very upfront and specific about that. For my part, I believe him. But with no legal protections, how comforting all that is depends on your own feelings and not much else as we have nothing but their word for support of any claims. Remember, it's just a donation, not an investment or a purchase. Though for the record, this is just an example, I actually think Star Citizen will not be betraying anyone.

Kickstarter does offer protection for getting a particular product you were promised upon donating a certain amount, but that's about it. If you were contributing to a larger project and the goodies you got were just a bonus, you have to just accept any loss from failed promises beyond the goodies. As crowdfunding becomes more commonplace, perhaps we will need to rethink how these things work?

And indeed some sites are now already offering the chance to buy into a company's potential future profits. Sites such as Crowdfunder offer the opportunity to back something as an investor, not just a fan. As things like the Oculus matter appear on the crowdfunding scene, there may be a move towards that kind of solution, with Kickstarter just enjoying the fame for now but becoming something for funding your local theater group more than a major development company in the future.

Perhaps that would be right, as, for all the fandom out there, companies are companies, and they exist to make a profit, not just to pursue "dreams" and visions of new games or technology. Of course, it's possible to get swindled through investing as with any other monetary exchange. But at least this leaves the boundaries and expectations clearer for those backing something. Sure there could be big losses, but there could also be big gains beyond a poster or whatever.

Personally, I have actually been happy about the new crowdfunding trend though and have enjoyed seeing some interesting projects get early backing that they might not otherwise have benefited from. I have often thought of crowdfunding as a trend that gave consumers more choices. Therefore, it could only be a good thing, most of the time. But examples like the Oculus Rift saga raise the issue of consumers being misled and then exploited, which is never a good thing no matter how many legal documents allow it to happen.

Some insist that any disappointment can be blamed on consumers unaware of what they were getting into when donating or buying dev kits. But I think that false advertising, even for donations, is troubling in any case. They may get their dev kits from Oculus, sure. But the vision they sold people to help convince them to donate may now be a thing of the past, not because the project failed, but because it chose to unexpectedly take a different direction, and the buyers know that. Sure, Facebook could turn out to be great for VR somehow, and take gaming along for the ride. But the backers are understandably skeptical about that right now.

I know there are as many ways to look at the situation as there are people typing on the Net and the debate rages on. But that's my stance. The backers may not be legally owed anything, but I can certainly understand why they are upset today. And this situation should be a wakeup call for new potential donators to projects on Kickstarter, especially as alternatives to the Kickstarter system begin to appear for crowdfunding that offer more to consumers than just warm fuzzies.

There have a been a few crowdfunded gaming revivals that have attracted my interest, among them Star Citizen itself which was meant to revive Wing Commander style sims, and the Satellite Reign project which is meant to develop a spiritual sequel in the Syndicate series of games which drew on inspiration from the cyberpunk sci-fi genre developed during the 1980's and 1990's. So far, I have only contributed any funds to the Mechwarrior Online game, through purchasing directly from their company early access to an actually playable game along with some in-game items. I have been reluctant to give anything to projects that do not offer me anything that direct in exchange. But even when something is offered, it can feel a bit exploitative.

For example, both Mechwarrior Online and Star Citizen have offered some outrageously high-priced items, such as a $500 gold-plated in-game mech in the case of MWO. Players of the game have scoffed at such offerings and have promised to target and destroy any gold-plated mechs encountered in the field, even if it's a team member's mech. Star Citizen has offered ship packages for as much as $15,000. As for Satellite Reign, though they have since appeared to remove this backer bonus, their offer earlier in the funding setup of a visit with the development team, in exchange for thousands of dollars and with all the trip expenses paid by the backer, left a bad taste in my mouth. Shaking hands with a few developers is now worth thousands? Ack. I know it's a donation, but still.

Crowdfunding CAN be a good thing that results in more choices for consumers and more opportunities for developers in a media environment that is often risk-averse to the point of stagnation and stupidity. As crowdfunding continues to change how companies fund projects and find their early footing, consumers need to be aware of how few protections they have and how their funding can all be for little or nothing when things don't work out.

But Kickstarter and the increasingly large and capable companies that are using it lately had best be aware of how this whole matter made their system look, and of the alternatives for real investment that are coming down the road in the world of crowdfunding. Someday soon, Kickstarter may look like the outmoded way of crowdfunding a project. I look forward to investment, not just charity, opportunities becoming more available to consumers as crowdfunding matures.

Rave

Net neutrality was struck down in the United States Court of Appeals today. What this means is that Internet service providers can limit the speed of access to certain sites and services or even block access altogether. So, providers in America are no longer required to provide access to all sites on the Net, and can give preferential treatment to services they provide, blocking competitors from providing alternative services. Your cable Net access provider doesn't like your DSL or fiber optic providers's movie service competition? They can simply block you from using it now.

They can also save their resources for beefing up access to only their own services, or just make it more expensive to use competing services. Therefore, it will be back to the AOL and Compuserve days, when the "Internet" was actually just access to small closed network services, and maybe email. It will also come to resemble cable television more, where the Internet is just used to provide access to a smaller and smaller number of set content streaming networks. Naturally, the days of sites like Fur Affinity are numbered.

In short, the Internet is dying. And with things having already been leaning in this direction with only a handful of competing services providing access to commercially produced productions and such, the age of everything from amateur arts to simple game streaming will come to an end. The Internet will gradually just become a very limited little set top box that helps you watch more cable television shows with "original" programming, like that last series about mobsters, or the one before that about prison, or the one before that which was also about mobsters, or quirky killers, or quirky vampires, or the several shows and movies about zombies, and so on. As we move to tablets rather than computers that can do actual work and to more such mindless consumption, there won't be any need for silly things like keyboards or stylus, or the ability to make anything of our own using computers. We will just have these little mobile television screens that help us turn off our brains, but don't provide access to Wikipedia anymore cause Wikipedia was non-profit and didn't have a deal with Verizon.

Then we will entertain ourselves to death while slowly forgetting how to write, or draw, or that we ever even had choices on the Net to begin with. It will be a great new world of boundless possibilities for network profits to look forward to. Home pages? Social networks? Our own creativity? Who needs any of that when we can have faster streaming of the latest movies about the latest young adult fiction novels, or more zombies?

Of course, the concentration on zombies lately has not been a coincidence. They have been preparing us for when we would become the zombies ourselves. Quiet, entertained, and without thought or objection. Goodbye Internet, it was fun while it lasted.

Rave

"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.”

- C.S. Lewis

When I was a little kid, my parents put me through a battery of various sorts of tests, to make sure the basic tests that kids get at school, checking for physical and developmental flaws and such, hadn't missed anything. Tests ran from physical things like eyesight to mental stuff like IQ. I was also tested psychologically, and as such got a good old fashioned Rorschach test.

As some of you may recall, Google recently celebrated the inventor of this test with an animated doodle that shows the viewer various inkblots, inviting their interpretation of them. The test experienced its greatest popularity among professionals during the 1960's, as the search links to Google's doodle reveal, but also became famous in general in Western culture even if they are not used by all professionals all the time. It involves showing those who take it inkblots and then recording their observations about what the inkblots look like to them.

When I took the test, I saw animals in the inkblots. Lot and lots of animal figures. Shocking, I know. Well, OK, maybe not all that surprising.

My tester quickly noted that I was mentally normal enough, whatever that means, but that I may have maturity issues, per the seeing of animal figures in the inkblots. This was a relief. They might think I was immature...but at least they didn't guess I was a furry! Whew, close call.

But jokey jokes aside, let's face it, the Interest in Animal Figures=Immaturity thing is something all furries deal with from that first moment in childhood when it tags you as different, right into adulthood, when the interest doesn't conveniently disappear as something you grow out of, like it was supposed to. Society does not approve of this interest. Which is fine, I suppose, nobody has to like it. But I sometimes regret that the disapproval is for all the wrong reasons, and that it is surrounded by so many contradictions and so much hypocrisy. When I read an article last week about something only vaguely related to fandom on Yahoo News, the article writer essentially described "furries" as people who dress up in mascot costumes and think they are animals. Augh.

We surround our kids with animal stories and cartoons that star animal figures, then are shocked when they don't lose a fondness for such things as they grow older. Given all the very adult fans of My Little Pony running around lately, I wonder how that will work out for them and for their kids? Some of them may not like to admit how "furry" they obviously are being, but they will face the same basic problem going forward - an interest in anthropomorphics is equated with immaturity in modern Western culture, no matter what inspires it, where it leads, or what it produces. MLP enthusiasm will not get a pass on this in the long run.

If anything, the mass appeal of MLP fandom and the popularity of the sexual aspects, even on non-Fur Affinity forums, only shows up the hypocrisy in the violent and broad brush reactions to "furry" over the years. Put a mainstream cover on it, and suddenly it's OK, even though it's all the same thing in the end. But then, we already knew that thanks to anime. Anime contains every fetish and every perversion one could think of both in its mainstream and more "adult" productions, yet some of its fans anxiously defend it while ignoring those issues, and then constantly assault Furry with accusations of perversity and immaturity.

Only anime is worse than any argument you might make about furry, in a way. At least furries have many, many angry debates among themselves about the line between art and porn, about the implications of violence and sexual violence in art, and the use of under-aged characters. But, if you interview anime creators, they have more excuses and rationalizations that admit nothing than you could ever count - "That rape scene furthered the plot." "The tentacles were symbolic!" etc.

Most of the time they either don't even bother to make explanations or the questions don't even come up though, as they don't see any problem here to begin with. When one of the hand wringers over at the Kotaku gaming news website questioned the pinupy art styles of the recently released Dragon's Crown game, the game's Japanese art director responded by suggesting that the critic must be gay. Cause hey, why else would he question the exploitation of female figures in a game unless he was playing for the other team, so to speak?

Watch enough Japanese media productions, and one starts to get the impression that, in that market, the exploitation issue is not a discussion. It's just an assumed business practice. To be fair, different cultural views about age and gender are part of this difference in perspective though, and perhaps we shouldn't make too direct a comparison between our own cultural expectations and those of another place, at least not without making some reasonable allowances and being aware of the differences.

And I don't mean to suggest that Western markets are pure in comparison. Watch any actor or actress scramble for explanations for the nudity in the latest Skinemax cable program while appearing on a talk show, and you will see very similar rationalizations for the simple reality that sex sells, whether it's in anime, anthro stuff, or live action.

Also, when money is at stake, ironic humor will serve as a fig leaf for the obviously questionable media content of stuff imported from the East - as shown in the marketing of one of the more recent shooting games by CAVE, in which the Western distributors openly used the term "loli" in "joke" ads to describe the under-aged, yet still sexualized, characters in the game, a first for Western marketing. And that game went on to sell better than any other recent release by that team. Was this because the game had pretty graphics and a relatively accessible difficulty level for a bullet hell shooter? Or was it because the game was "lolitastic?" We may never know for sure.

I can still recall the first time I heard that furries simply must all be pedophiles, because they like cartoon animals, and cartoon animals are cute, and cute=kids, so...somehow that equates to pedo. But when openly sexualized kid characters are simply featured in anime, no such mental gymnastics are required to come to the conclusion that PedoBear would give a stamp of approval, yet I don't hear the same such complaints about anime fans so often. Funny how that works. Could it be that objections to furries actually don't have much to do with such moral claims at all at heart? Maybe!

At a time when Fur Affinity has recently banned sexualized under-aged characters, anime and other Eastern media products introduce more and more of them, with Western marketing teams quietly looking the other way, or even more loudly exploiting it when it works for sales. But the furries are the ones the Internet rages at for being perverse and immature. Obviously, this has nothing to do with morals, ethics, or even standards for normality. It has to do with anthropomorphics being something that some have an adverse reaction to and a possible connection to taboo things that some cultures have a certain antipathy towards, along with assumptions about immaturity being related to any such interests. Last but not least, articles like the one I mentioned earlier here further muddy the waters with misinformation about the fandom. Meanwhile, the Net communities give the excesses of anime and such a free pass, as long as it's human figures being exploited, as if the imaginary anthro animal people needed more protection in society than actual humans.

Before you take me as an apologist for fandumb though, I should point out that it's not that simple. When I wrote a report on the "furry" art community for school a while back, I was pretty upfront about the presence of actually mentally ill people in the group and the problems the community faced. And since then, it eventually dawned on me that many disturbed and mentally ugly people who barely have any real interest in anthropomorphics have been attracted to the "community" over the years for all the wrong reasons. I know the group has its issues. But if you think that Furry is the only place for drama, you need to get out in other communities more.

Over on one of the game forums I have frequented the past few years, there have been scam scandals involving thousands of dollars, a forum member convicted of murder, counterfeiting accusations, and death threats between members, and all just in the relatively short time I have been there. Furry is nothing special when it comes to drama, except in the imaginations of furries. If anything, perhaps we should be thankful that most of our drama is really just relatively harmless arguing.

To sum up, we will only really be mature as a community when we stop with the misguided self hate that magically transforms any media product we happen to respect that includes anthropomorphics into something that is "Not...really...furry" and has us pretending we are not "really" so into something we obviously love, just cause some of us worry what the rest of the Internet might think. And real maturity as an Internet community may come when we stop covering up reactionary hatreds with supposedly dignifying but less than honest arguments about moral claims regarding Furry, and other things, that are not the real reason for objections to it.

The vast majority of us are not pedophiles, zoophiles, mascot suit wearers who think we are animals, or anything else besides fans of anthro animal characters. For all my writing here and all the arguments you will hear to the contrary, it's really not that complicated and it's nothing that should need layers of argument, pro and con, or hiding. For artists especially, the opportunities for creativity and expression found in anthropomorphics continue to have an enduring and irresistible pull for many of us. To not continue to enjoy that for fear of the thoughts or objections of others would be less than adult behavior.

Rave

Now that the American government has been shut down, the government agencies can't observe us as they normally do because they don't have the resources for spying of late. Therefore, we currently have a window here during which we can speak more openly of our plot for FWR.

As you know, our Sonic-X5 project helped bring many new young people into the furry fold, but the Council of Five decided stronger measures were needed. And so, the MLP-002 project was born, with resounding success following the careful planning and implementation. This shows what can be accomplished if we carefully incorporate new projects into The Plan.

The next decade has tons of potential for the further corruption of today's youth, if we just stick to The Plan and remember that every new convert counts. Our agents are well placed across the Net and yet nobody even suspects their presence in every corner of the Web. They comfort themselves with stereotypes and assumptions that they know where our people are and what they are like. When the time is right, we will reward their complacency with our ascendency and triumph. They won't know what hit them when a giant paw of supremacy covers all.

Remember to meet next week at Conference Area 12 for a special planning session. We have some exciting things in the works for this winter that need your input. There will be cookies.

Rave

Sorry for the delay the past few...months, augh, in posting new art. I so wanted to post more often this year, but it's been tough to get full projects done for a variety of reasons. And, as usual, the weird thing is that I am working every week on art, yet never quite reach a satisfying conclusion to most of the projects. Anyways, I will have two new pics to post in relatively quick succession soon and should have more time for art during the winter. But some folks have told me that they watched me for my essays, so here is one of those for now:

As I see game reviews start to come in for GTA V, I notice that many of them note that the game has flaws, but the reviewer is giving the game five stars anyway. Some of those flaws being listed are, what do you know, very similar to some of the gameplay and narrative flaws found in previous games in the series. I almost wonder if reviewers are afraid to give an honest star rating due to the torrents of abuse and accusations from fans that move could inspire, or if they really are just automatically in awe of the game's admittedly obvious technical qualities and adult storytelling. This pattern reminds me a lot of what happened the last few times some Rockstar games were released. Only from gamers themselves did I hear complaints about those games, while the reviewers were too busy showering them with praise to be even remotely critical.

Either way, this kind of grade inflation seems increasingly automatic for major releases by major developers or, for that matter, certain directors lately in movie reviews. I recall how fans attacked less than ecstatic reviews for Inception when it first came out. Yet only months later, even the more geeky among movie fans were increasingly willing to admit that the film was less than perfect, after the excitement and hype had settled down.

I have not played GTA V yet, so it may indeed be worth all those perfect score reviews for all I know. But when I read reviews that list a catalog of flaws in the game, and still give a perfect score noting just that the graphics and world building are impressive yet again in a GTA game, it reminds me an awful lot of what happened the last few times this developer released games that were reviewed pretty much the same way. Yes, I get it, the graphics are nice. I kinda expect that though for a game that cost a hundred million to make.

Before I'm accused of just being a hater, I should mention that I have a lot of appreciation for many of these media products. But reviewers need to be allowed to do an honest and detailed job without the fanboy or fangirl attacks being a reason to hold back, and without feeling pressure for rubber stamping approval for triple A titles in loved series. As some of you may have noticed, I love critical analysis, especially of the things I enjoy. So an Internet where merely mentioning a more nuanced view of a media product always provokes an instant and crude personal attack is a disappointment. Can't adults get beyond this?

I also recall the fiasco of many game reviewers telling the gamers how wrong they were to not automatically embrace the online requirements and dumbed down skill trees of Diablo 3. Everyone was wrong and we should all just stop whining and serve Blizzard's bottom line without question. I even recall one reviewer suggesting it was wrong of another new game to not handle skill trees the same way it had been done in Diablo 3, as that was the "trend the industry is currently headed in"...as if they were reviewing smartphone variations and not new games. What's next? Game reviews based on company stock fluctuations?

All this in game and movie reviews lately is a pattern that I am not alone in noticing. An article in Now Gamer sums up the problem very well and goes into detail on a specific recent example. I suggest reading it, I have provided a link below:
http://www.nowgamer.com/features/19.....calm_down.html

Rave

I would rather be writing about Net and gaming trends and such, but folks have started to ask about my presence on here, so first things first. I am still on FA and continue to follow you guys and others as always. A number of new folks have watched me of late, including some whose work I grew up looking at or reading, and that has been an honor and wonderful to see happening. I apologize to all concerned that I have not been posting much that is new so far this year.

I want so much to start posting again, and indeed, I have actually been working nearly every week of the year on several works of new art, all of which are slated to eventually appear here when they are completed. I think some of them are among the better works I have done and I look forward to sharing them with you. It's the finishing of new works that takes a while though. Something always seems to keep coming up back in real life that can contribute to a delay, and making progress in one's work requires messy experimentation that takes a while to clean up and prepare for final posting. I'm not one to post sketches or unfinished works, but that may have to change if delays continue to pile up, as I want to continue to entertain people with my work.

And my more recent experiments have yielded interesting and fun results that I think you may enjoy. I have recently started using the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T for making art, instead of my usual Wacom Cintiq 12WX. And the move to a different art tool has really been a revelation for me. I'm not sure which new element, such as the higher resolution, the sharper contrast and color, or the light and wireless approach, has made the most difference, but I have found myself enjoying drawing digitally as I never have before. I don't normally enjoy drawing, I just force myself to do it, so that's a big shift for me.

As some of you may recall from earlier comments on here, I have long lamented the lack of alternatives to Wacom's tools, as it seemed time for less heavy and wired solutions. Although the new device uses Wacom technology it has its own approach to how wonderfully low-weight it is, while also having a larger and better screen than the Wacom tablet. It's true that it can't achieve the speeds in more demanding software such as Photoshop that a Wacom attached to a desktop PC can. But when drawing in Sai, it's just a wonderful experience, though perhaps not a perfect one for everyone.

There are certainly some quirks, and the tablet needs to have its touch feature turned off to help you concentrate on the stylus when drawing. Not a big deal, but there are some other quirks that are less easily solved. None of them have been deal breakers for me, but others may feel differently as how one works on art is different for everyone and we all have different sensitivities.

For someone like me though, who grew up learning how to draw on the backs of tiny post-it notes and still really needs a small and light surface to draw on, this device has really hit the sweet spot after years of disappointments with the whole tablet PC concept, let alone using one as an art tool. I think the brilliant Samsung screen really helps, as the view at 1080 P leaves the experience feeling more like natural drawing than what one usually gets out of a display tablet, especially when coupled with the strong contrast and color. One can fool about without every pixel standing out in the wrong ways and with a nice liquid feel to the overall experience.

Admittedly, part of the delays for posting new art this year have been due to how, after enjoying experimenting with one new drawing idea, I find myself overly anxious to move onto the next exciting concept, leaving the last one unfinished or uncolored. This is because each new drawing is so much fun to work on. I have started more projects in the past several weeks than I have in years. This is more like it, far as how the art process should be. Now, if I could only get things done in completed form faster, I would be working more like the artists I look up to.

I will post finished works soon though, it will just have to be a trickle before the flood. But new art is certainly on the way and you may be surprised by the small and large changes being made in some parts of my approach. I hope you will stay tuned to see what results will show up.

Rave

I know that some of you may have begun to think that this day would never come. That the bombardment of campaign ads would never stop. That YouTube would continue to be taken over by ads in front of even videos with low view counts, telling you to be afraid of this or that candidate. And by "hilarious" candidate rap videos. Over time, you may have become numb, driving past campaign signs and bumper stickers each day. But the end is finally upon us. This election year will now come to a close on election day, tomorrow.

Or it may continue for months more due to court challenges in a close election. The important thing though is to remember to vote. I know many of you may be too numb now to feel like it's any use or will make any difference. But have you ever thought of how that might not be an accident? Perhaps that is the real point of the multimedia onslaught we have been suffering through - to convince us, however subconsciously, that the elaborate apparatus of campaigns we see before us is too organized, too powerful, just too much for any one person to affect in the least way. And that is how you can end up disenfranchised and not even know it has happened. By giving up when it all just seems too much...just like they intended all along with their endless ads, and polls and media interviews.

But even if it's not a vast conspiracy, it's still pretty annoying to think that some people may give up on something so many others have died for. You have a right to not vote. But the best and most responsible exercise of your right is to vote and know that every vote counts in these close elections, which will only get closer as the nation becomes more polarized.

I guess this journal is becoming the obituary column. Oh well, I can't help it if all the great ones seem to be dying lately. Butzi Porsche, Carol Shelby, and now.. the writer Ray Bradbury. Augh.

Hardly a year has gone by when I have not been a little heartened by the fact that Bradbury was still alive. I grew up listening to old time radio shows on public radio that featured his stories from broadcasts that were already many decades old back then. Then, I read his books for myself and discovered that the dramatized stories were only brushing the surface of his wonderful work. I knew that all those who had performed his stories on the radio were dead, even back when I was a kid. Yet, surprise, surprise Bradbury was, weirdly, still alive, even as I grew into adulthood.

Well, some good things must end, and now Bradbury has finally ended with his death on Wednesday. He had reached his 90s.

People often recall how poetic and lovely his work was, but it was the stuff with bite from him that attracted me the most. His dark tales took his usual flair for the poetic and turned it into proper nightmares, even while being thought provoking as well. Some of his horror stories genuinely scared me, which I can't say for most of the more graphic stuff one finds published today.

When it came to chilling stories of the kind that touched more on sociology and politics, Bradbury's work could be just as hard hitting and even more subversive. He predicted, quite rightly if one trusts statistics, that people would eventually become ensconced in their homes, going out less and less as home entertainment media flourished and books became a thing of the past.

In one classic Bradbury story, a man simply walks outside his home one time too often during prime time television, and a police car comes by to pick him up. He notices upon entering the car, which speaks to him with a voice that questions why he is outside and what may be wrong with his television, that there is no human driver in the robotic car. He asks where he is being taken to and is told he is to be re-educated at an institution. As he is driven there, he see's all the quiet homes in the night with all the people watching screens and never leaving. The streets are utterly empty, save for the police cars, which don't even have people in them anymore.

In a Bradbury horror story of the future, conformity is enforced, but it's not conforming to a regimental society or a military push, but rather, conforming to watching television and avoiding books or troubling questions about society. In a Ray Bradbury distopia, it's not that there is constant war, deprivation or cyberpunks making the streets unsafe. No, it's just that people have quietly stopped going outside. Or thinking very much. There may in fact be a war on, but people would rather watch TV than consider it. As time has passed, his vision only appears more prescient.

But writers of the time like Orwell and Bradbury are from a different era, one in which totalitarianism had recently been on the rise and the death of personal liberties had been something nations had only just recently struggled with, along with issues of surveillance and privacy. These days, his ideas seem to be increasingly forgotten as our own time grows more distant from that era.

His messages may have once seemed subversive when I first read them, but I now view them as intrinsically American and mainstream, in a way, in that they reflect our best values before we started, as he predicted we would, to forget them. Robots now give out tickets and our cities have become filled with surveillance cameras. Just as the world is becoming more connected through technology, we hear CEOs at tech conferences declaring our ideas of personal privacy "outdated" and suggesting that we should make our lives more convenient by telling them all about ourselves constantly through their helpful applications that lead us to watch more and more media and be entertained to death. The other day, my tablet asked me to give it my location because Google wanted to know it. Didn't give me a reason, just said it wanted to know.

While Orwell envisioned a boot stomping on a human face forever, Bradbury understood that many people may not need to be forced under any boots to give up their minds, souls and rights. It might just be convenient to do so and happen before we have noticed it, after the books have all been burned.

Rave

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche died this month. He was the son of the grandson of Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, who started the family's work on sports cars. He started working at the family business in the late 1950s and eventually became the designer of the Porsche company's most successful car design, that of the Porsche 911. He also designed the famous 904 car for Porsche. As a bit of a Porsche fan, I couldn't help but feel a little sad that "Butzi", as his family nickname dubbed him, has died.

After the Porsche family no longer ran the car company, he went on to head the Porsche Design company which released various products with often intriguingly minimalist design characteristics from hard drives to watches. His work on the 911 was not a huge departure in design, but it did have enough of a spark of originality and style to have lasted for a long time. Though we shouldn't kid ourselves regarding the design's longevity being an absolute, as Porsche actually tried to retire the 911 at least once in its history, but was unable to successfully replace it with the 928. But then, it's also arguably true that the 928 really didn't have as relatively timeless a design as the 911.

Now, for better or for worse, Porsche seems stuck with the basic 911 shape as being representative of its entire line of cars. Some people complain that all Porsches look alike, but then, so do Astons lately, among other car lines. And the same fans that complain of samey Porsche designs, proclaim a loss of Ye Olde Porsche Flavor whenever the company attempts to try something new. Porsche may be stuck with the 911 shape forever, as any other type of Porsche is quietly regarded as not being a "True Porsche" in the eyes of many.

So, whether he knew it at the moment or not, Ferdinand Porsche gave us the shape of Porsche cars for his time and times to come. As a designer, you just never know when and how your influence will be felt. He didn't consider himself an artist. But I think we know better. RIP Butzi.

Rave

When Andrew Breitbart, an Internet media mogul, died during this past week, the media found itself in a peculiar position. On the one hand, they didn't want to sound crass or unprofessional in their obituaries for the man. But on the other hand, Breitbart himself had a history of taking pride in speaking ill of the recently dead and never held back in his own commentary while claiming to enjoy making enemies. And many of the people who would be commenting on this occasion had themselves been targets of his pen and of his campaigns to "destroy" them personally and professionally.

So, what to do on this occasion? Gloat now that their enemy is dead? Say a few things about how at least he was entertaining sometimes, as one sometimes says of athletes who do questionable things but make interesting headlines in the process? Mention that his family will miss him? Breitbart himself claimed to be a "performance artist" rather than a serious journalist. But then so do certain heroes of the left, such as John Stewart, even while his show begins to become an influential comment piece and a genuine source of news for many young people, and people on the right like Glenn Beck also claim to be entertainers. Can everyone just go with the "I'm an infotainer, so no standards apply to me." line and then call it a day on ethics and standards?

I don't think so, not in this age when the line between entertainment and news is so blurred. But I will focus here on the less broad question of how to deal with the "new media" age of super proactive trolls like Breitbart. In a way, we Internet people have a certain long familiarity with the type that these journalist people struggling to comment on Breitbart may lack. In our own chan board, forum and social network communities, people like Breitbart who send out spies to pretend to be friends long enough to gather information that will later be used against opponents is an old story. People use smurf accounts to do shit like that all the time in Internet communities. Of course, the weirdos who go that hard core in their Internet battles are often quietly regarded as crazy twits by the community at large. But when you do that in the mainstream media, it makes you a hero to some, as long as you did it to the other side of a political debate.

It's weird how people will forgive most anything, as long as you are on their side. I recall how Hunter S. Thompson used to write that Clinton was a bastard, but at least he was "our bastard", which supposedly made it OK. Meanwhile, I'm not so sure it is OK. Oh, and speaking of those willing to speak ill of the dead, Thompson was no less restrained than Breitbart on this point, at one time mentioning how Nixon's casket should have been placed in a gutter. When Thompson died, the media had a similar problem to deal with as on this occasion of Breitbart's death, with people dividing along partisan lines again. Some Internet conservatives were just as nasty towards Thompson when he died as he had been in dealing with some of his opponents.

When one of Breitbart's operatives famously embarrassed the ACORN organization by recording counseling sessions during which ACORN reps appeared to go along with under aged prostitution schemes, I actually thought it was pretty awesome as it revealed real potential problems with the perspective and approach of the organization. But later, his people got arrested for trespassing in a congress critter's offices, and some of Breitbart's recordings appeared to be edited to disguise the truth.

My enthusiasm for Breitbart was dimming fast as he began to appear to be just another Internet twit taking himself a little too seriously while mostly merely "aggregating" news on his sites from more reputable sources and engaging in the occasional stunt or in "performance artist" trolling while protesting a little too loudly about how much fun making enemies of former friends supposedly is and how fun being a maniacal provocateur is. In other words, just yet another pompous Internet troll claiming to enjoy his spiral down into degradation and all the site hits it gets him, as if we don't have enough already.

I notice that, even on sites like Ars Technica, some of the editors are starting to act in a similar way, and when people call them on it, they openly point to how it gets them more site hits, as if that makes it all OK and justifies acting like 14 year old chan boarders on a supposedly professional news site. (Cause, as we all know, money is all that matters in life and justifies anything and everything.) Isn't this getting a tad old and stale? Really, we need to stop rewarding troll editors with endless debate and site hits and just start to ignore such stuff and demand higher standards for headlines and stories, or this whole "new media" of the Internet will just devolve into endless profitable, yet pointless, snipe attack sessions by adults acting like children. (For my part, I stopped visiting sites that have editors carrying on like that.)

Likewise, some obits actually gave Breitbart some sort of perverse credit for supposedly being ahead of the curve on understanding that news is now entertainment rather than something serious. A performance art rather than an important profession with standards and principles serving a public good. I read such obits and wonder "How is this progress??"

As for how we should remember such people, I know folks often want to respectfully reference their families or something. But I'm reminded of a troll on one of the mucks I used to frequent. Like Breitbart he used to go on and on about how much he enjoyed being controversial, and how great being an attention whore was. Naturally, he had his share of misguided fans and, as is typical in these cases, they pointed to what a great family man he supposedly was when people mentioned what a jerk he was on-line. The troll himself played up this angle, with constant references to his "lady love" wife and his great relationship with his kids. Somehow, I didn't quite buy it all though. How could someone who acted like a nasty crazy person on-line be so supposedly wonderful back in Real Life Land? How well adjusted could such a person really be behind the scenes?

Well, not much later "lady love" divorced his ass, leaving him living in an apartment with another guy and estranged from his kids. And nobody was surprised, except perhaps for his handful of idiot fans. Revealingly, he quickly turned from a sneering troll with his supposedly wonderful family life to fall back on to a just openly bitter and nasty person who lost control and was eventually banned.

Behind all the claims about performance art, and enjoying controversy and trolling, people who act like crazy and unhealthy twits in the public sphere might just have some private issues as well, so don't be fooled. Besides, even if their personal lives really were as perfect as they claim and they acted like great people behind the scenes, what of it? We can only judge people by our own experience of them and, on-line, we only get to see and judge their public face. Christopher Hitchens just so happened to have had a drinking problem between his provocative behaviors, and Breitbart just happened to look like a heart attack waiting to happen. Now both these provocateurs are dead at a relatively young age. Should any of us be so surprised?

I think conservative columnist David Frum put it best in his column on the subject of Breitbart's passing:

"We live in a time of political and media demagoguery unparalleled since the 19th century. Many of our most important public figures have gained their influence and power by inciting and exploiting the ugliest of passions—by manipulating fears and prejudices—by serving up falsehoods as reported truth. In time these figures will one by one die. What are we to say of this cohort, this group, this generation? That their mothers loved them? That their families are bereaved? That their fans admired them and their employees treated generously by them? Public figures are inescapably judged by their public actions. When those public actions are poisonous, the obituary cannot be pleasant reading."

See how much better Frum's writing is than mine? No, wait...what I meant to say was - All this said though, we are all just people here on this globe, going through many of the same struggles and having to live with each other, sometimes recognizing, if not always embracing, a connectedness that we share. Part of the problem with the sociopathic behavior of some of the more hard core Internet people is that they don't seem to grasp this. As such, some of the outright celebratory responses to Breitbart's death do seem a bit unseemly. I can't really blame his enemies for responding this way though. After all, he pledged to destroy them, so why should they pretend to be anything but happy that he failed and then died? I don't recall hesitating a whole lot before laughing at Bin Laden jokes on the occasion of his death. Where does one draw the line?

I think that the fair compromise is to recognize each others humanity, while still being able to call a spade a spade and not play pretend about it too much in false piety. Andrew Breitbart was a person. I'm not happy that he died young. But I'm not going to pretend that he was good for the community, when he wasn't.

Rave

http://www.livestream.com/ravewolf

Remember those horribly pixelated and jerky live art streams I used to present to you? Yeah, I mostly forced them out of my memory too, as they always felt kind of pointless when you could barely see what was going on. But now, there have been developments that allow me to present a higher quality live video stream to you. My Net connection can run much faster now, allowing me to broadcast in higher resolutions with high quality and smoother speeds. Check out the link if you are interested. I'm no great entertainer, but I do try to interact with the chat while working on art and am not shy about revealing techniques if you are curious. The link:
http://www.livestream.com/ravewolf

First of all, though I have not been posting as much lately, I want to let you know that I have been working hard on art and will be posting a new pic or two soon. The problem, aside from the usual business, is that I am working hard to learn new things about everything from new designs to painting and such, and it takes longer to make new things while learning some basics. I hope you enjoy the end results, but we will just have to see how the newer work is received when I post it.

Anyway, the latest Cintiq model for their desktop screen tablet is out and...I'm not at all interested in it. For goodness sake, it weighs 65 pounds!

Yes, I know it's partly to balance the thing, but c'mon, this is the era of the super low weight tablet with high contrast and color depth, and they actually add MORE weight to the Cintiq line? What's next? A 30 pound version of the 12WX that crushes your knees when you try to put it in your lap? I was so looking forward to a more advanced version of the concept that weighs less, is more flexible and has more contrast. Instead, we get this thing which is heavier, less flexible, and has "gentle" but not so strong and accurate color. Augh! It's like Wacom is moving backwards!

I can only hope that the next version of the 12WX, which is a tablet size that I strongly prefer anyway, actually has advancements instead of moving backwards away from what I want in a good graphics tablet. I often think that it would be nice if Wacom had more competition, or at least other producers licensing their technology.

Speaking of which, I did try the Asus eee tablet pc, which includes a digitizer pen with Wacom drivers. Now THAT is a low weight and high speed tool, albeit limited to the same size, resolution and lower pressure sensitivity than the Cintiq 12WX. Unfortunately though, the colors, while an improvement over the Cintiq 12wx, were still not as vibrant as a proper monitor. While the tablet PC solution lacks the wires of the Cintiq and has full portability, it also lacks the higher pressure pressure sensitivity and, more importantly, the independence and responsiveness of a dedicated tablet.

Wedding your graphics tablet experience to Windows 7 tablet PC technology results in some pretty frustrating problems, from the tablet confusing your hand with the pen, to other weird quirks. Also, even with better contrast and color, the Asus model still provides a slightly fuzzier view of the lines than the Cintiq 12wx does, which is disconcerting and slightly disorienting when trying to do precise line work. All and all, the Cintiq 12WX is still the better choice, except perhaps when mobile. It's just that little bit snappier in its responsiveness, which can make all the difference when trying to whip something up in Paint Tool Sai.

My dream tablet would be an oled based device with the incredible contrast and the tiny amount of weight an oled based display could be based on, a very clear view of the screen, and all the responsiveness of the Cintiq 12WX. Oh well, maybe someday.

Rave

LA Noire is a new game form Rockstar that is set in post-war 1940's Los Angeles and depicts an adventure game style police detective story. Spoilers ahead.

Not very fond of Rockstar games lately. They all seem to be trying too hard. Too hard to shock, too hard to be sophisticated, and too hard to be snarky and wise all at once. The genuinely clever wit of the early GTA games was replaced with crass humor designed to appeal to the lowest of the lowest common denominator in the more recent games. And their historical fiction efforts weasel in a few too many modern perspectives to not crack the immersiveness of the worlds they are otherwise trying to faithfully recreate, as if trying to show how modern they are, even while depicting the past. I'm reminded of movies like the historical fiction that usually comes out of Hollywood. Decent films, and with some amazing historical accuracy...in the props department. But with stories that are either implausible or that reek of a modern sensibility that would be out of place in the actual time being depicted.

Remember the Hollywood adaptation of the Name of the Rose? One of the key elements of the novel the film was based on was that, in the actual middle ages being depicted, the characters would be powerless against the systems in place of the time to prevent certain injustices from happening, and therefore didn't pointlessly stick their necks out at the wrong moments, when they knew it would make absolutely no difference in their world. By contrast, in the movie version, Sean Connery openly makes proclamations against injustice and defies authority right and left. This completely misses the point, and doesn't feel very real for the times being depicted.

Likewise, if you are looking for a 1940's simulation in LA Noire, and the game seems to want you to think that's what it is on some level, you run into some similar problems with modern sensibilities coming out of 1940's mouths. The characters make references to oil as a motivation for wars (oh wow, a timely political reference, my mind is so...blown by the deep writing!), and to American future hegemony in ways that just don't feel very 1940's America at all (even one of the radio stations is named "American Century"), and remind you that the game was made in 2011 Australia. They also have characters often making cold war references when the cold war would not have been in such full swing yet. Then there's references to the H-bomb, when it hadn't been invented yet (A-bomb used in WW II, not H-bomb.), and another scene where a character refers to the lottery as being a tax on poor people in a way that sounds more like a modern article in the Times rather than something someone from the bad part of town in 1946 would have actually said.

It's like they want to show us the 1940's while showing off that they hired modern liberal professors to do the game writing at the same time. Augh. I suppose we are lucky they didn't squeeze a nice tasteful reference to 9/11 in the middle of the 1940's just to show how edgy they could be to boot. Yes, I realize that the writers can't help sounding at times like the modern people they are, but I think it could have been less obvious and less clunkily inserted at times.

I mean, hell, they not only have the main character expressing sympathy for the Japanese during the war, but they have to go one better and show him having an affair with a German after the war, just in case you didn't get it how enlightened and open minded he is, unlike those racist simpleton cretins that supposedly filled all of the rest of 1940's America. Even the arguments they use when trying to show enlightenment don't quite add up, like the old saw of how the Japanese were supposedly just invading most of Asia cause they needed natural resources to fuel their cars. Really, Rockstar? Really?? I'm supposed to think they didn't need oil for the racism and militarism driven war machine they were using to slaughter and enslave their neighbors too? And I guess the Germans just needed lebensraum? I didn't like the Bush admin's war for oil in Iraq either, but I don't make such grasping arguments about a totally different war just to make cheap shots against it.

The things the game gets right are borrowed, though admittedly in a well executed way, from earlier source material. Some of the cases depicted seem similar to old episodes of Dragnet. The radio plays were from the late forties, not long after the time period of the game, and the 50's television show often merely rehashed those 1940's episodes with scenes added for the camera. So either way, whether borrowing from the radio show or the televised version, you can't go wrong, these are stories of 1940's crime in LA. This isn't a bad thing though. Dragnet really was mostly based on true stories and Jack Webb was sincere about wanting to keep things realistic. If they did crib from Dragnet, they couldn't have picked a better source for inspiration.

On the other hand, this reminds me of how this has all been done before, even as I get the impression that the game would like us to think that this subject matter would never have been touched in a 1940's show. I notice that some gamers have mentioned that the game seems to be trying to be shocking, when it would have been better served by more careful story execution in general. And I think they have a point there. The case in the game about a teen getting taken advantage of during a supposed photo shoot in Hollywood may seem slimy and sort of shocking, even today, but there was a 1940's episode of Dragnet that had pretty much the same plot, photo shoot and all.

Pedophilia is used for shock value a couple of times in the story, yet they always depict the victims as being nonchalant about what has happened to them. I guess that's supposed to be a shocking modern take on the theme as well? Yes, I know young teens have sexualities, Rockstar, but depicting them being almost cool with having been drugged and raped seems a little off somehow.

They also seem to have borrowed the former adversaries in a potential love triangle becoming cooperating pals idea for the game from a more recent noire source - LA Confidential. But, again, such homages are forgivable, and perhaps even appropriate for this sort of thing. Though I was slightly disappointed to not see even one 1940's style Hammett or Agatha Christie style plot line, complete with an inheritance and gathering everyone at dinner to reveal the murderer etc. This is much less a noire of the period, and more of a realistic police procedural throughout.

Still, featuring the evidently rather educated lead character feels like a thin excuse for said character saying "enlightened" things about the times that remind you that it's the game's writers who are actually talking. And the way he reminds everyone around him of his education in such cliche ways (Predictable quoting of latin, plus Shakespeare references ahead!) feels clunky. Yes, I get it that he is supposed to come off as a bit of an uptight asshole anyway, but it's still too constant a barrage. College education may have been less common in the 1940's, but I'm guessing it didn't instantly turn people into megageeks when they were exposed to it.

And oh yes, he does have a dark secret in his past from his war experience. You know, kind of like a certain character named Niko, from another Rockstar game. In one webcast I saw of someone playing the game, the player laughingly suggested that he must have killed some puppies when he was younger. Gamers just don't care about this maneuver anymore in a game's "dark" plot line. Time to come up with a new "twist", Rockstar.

To be fair, having the lead character be someone so flawed is indeed new territory for a game from Rockstar, where the leads are often the only cool characters in the games. In this game, the lead starts out all stuffy and defensive with his new partners, but slowly learns to respect and appreciate most of them, up to a point. It's a nice new approach, though it does get repetitive.

A few other things get repetitive too, like the chase scenes, and the way every damn pedestrian notes that he has seen your picture in the newspapers.

Some of the action scenes are skippable though. The game really does emphasize detective work and mystery solving above all else, and this emphasis serves it well. The game's depiction of facial movements is uncanny and allows you to interpret how characters react to your questioning. This is innovative and effective.

But then, as many gamers have pointed out (Most critics are too busy drooling over how the game has some innovative features and bothers to have a story to begin with to say much that is actually critical in their analysis. Pro reviewers who have to give a number score and have seen everything twice are so starved for innovation that they instantly uprate anything remotely new.), the story falls apart even more completely as the player reaches the last fourth or so of the game. They throw in even worse flaws for the main character that, importantly, go unexplained. Some players have complained of how the jerk corrupt cop character was monotone and had no character development, leaving his speech at the end of the game pointlessly ironic rather than truly hard hitting. But I find it worse that the perspective in the game suddenly shifts from your previous main to an entirely different character. Innovative? Or just "What were they thinking??" I think most gamers came down on the "WTF?" side of that issue.

LA Noire starts out as a fairly fun game, and then it gets too ambitious yet misguided in its storytelling, unsatisfying in its conclusion, and repetitive in its gameplay. If they wanted to do a point-and-click adventure game, then maybe they should have just done that and avoided the whole sandbox world thing, which they approached in a more halfhearted way this time than was done in the GTA series.

It seems as if Rockstar is still struggling with the whole telling of a serious story thing. They keep trying to make The Great American (But made in Scotland or Australia.) Video Game story of our time, and just end up falling into their own set of cliches. The main character was a good example - they try to make him a sophisticated voice of the game writer, but also a flawed character. But as many gamers have pointed out, you never get to see his flaws fleshed out in a sensible way that one can follow, like showing us how his affair happened, or even how his mistake during the war happened. We are told things rather than shown them, and then expected to take them at face value. A rather rookie writing mistake for a game that had millions of development dollars spent on it, and now wants forty of your dollars for the privilege of playing it.

Rave

Well, For the second time in my life, Washington DC (downtown area I mean) is evacuating. Not an official evacuation, but it might as well be as we have all been ordered out of our office buildings onto the street. Annoyingly, like last time (9/11) it is a bit difficult to get out of the city, only worse this time as the trains are running slow as a precaution. So slow in fact, that expecting to catch one is unrealistic at this point. So, I am stuck typing this on my tablet right now while on a bench on the street. There is no place to go, no way to escape the city. Many other young office workers like myself are making an early happy hour of it at local cafes and taverns as our long wait sets in. I will probably join them soon. But meanwhile, a journal entry to pass the time.

As most of you must know by now, there was an eathquake today along the east coast. It actually had its epicenter in my home state of Virginia though, and rattled us here in DC. The east coast is not used to this sort of thing, so everyone called it a day and decided to go home. Hence the sudden and impossible commute.

Personally, I have already been in many earthquakes, so I am puzzled by all the closings which feel overly careful to me. But those earthquake experiences were from my time in Central America, and this region here has not had a 5.9, (gosh, nearly a 6) during the lifetime of anyone I know, so it's understandable that people are alarmed, if perhaps overreacting a bit. To be fair, perhaps it's a case of better safe than sorry.

The streets are packed, and cars are barely moving, but people are being civil enough and all this will pass. No aftershocks so far, which is helpful. It's a shame not being able to get home, but at least it is a lovely day and an earthquake does break up the day for a change of pace. No cell signals are getting through, but as you can see, the Internet is not so easily silenced, thanks to my mifi, which has been very useful today for news updates.

All this happening so close to the tenth anniversary of the last city evacuation is a bit disconcerting as it does bring back unpleasant memories, but perhaps it is good to be reminded now and then of how uncertain each hour really is.

I hope the day finds the rest of you safe and sound. Remember, if it gets feisty again, don't go in the basement. It's an earthquake, go outside for goodness sake.

Rave

I love rock and roll. But wow, many of the traditional rock song themes sure have some messed up messages in them...

1. "Being a teen is the best time you will ever have in your life and it's all downhill from there."

Many classic rock songs tend to emphasize one's adolescent years as being the best one can get out of life. Even when I was a kid myself, I found this a very strange message. Aside from the fact that adolescence is far from a big party for many people, even those of us who did have a fairly good time generally had a lot more to look forward to beyond the boundaries of high school. Personally, I have since school lived in or explored about ten countries, and had plenty of adventures. To be honest, I barely even remember school at this point. Yet so many rock songs are very intent on telling me that being a kid is the ultimate experience in life and that everything sorta sucks after that. It seems to be one of the basic rock and roll themes.

Now, I know what some of you may be thinking - that I'm taking nostalgia songs too seriously and exaggerating their qualities. But if you listen closely to the lyrics, Bryan Adams is quite specific about those being the best years of his life (by implication, everything afterwards must have been less good), an Bob Seger tells us in multiple songs that his life has turned to shit since he was a kid. I'm not sure why rock songs seem to want to encourage us to slit our wrists as soon as we turn 20, but it's an unmistakable theme, and it's dumb.

2. "Being a rebel is the way to be, don't study in school, conform to conventions or live responsibly, cause all that noise is just The Man getting you down."

Discouraging kids from bettering themselves is one of the other strange messages that pop artists love feeding to gullible youngsters, despite the fact that the artists themselves have been conforming to the music industry and societal expectations of it for years. I recall coming across one of these songs while clicking through old 90's tunes on YouTube, and seeing someone wryly observe in the comments section that "People who actually live in the anarchic way this song describes...don't listen to music like this."

The contradictions aside though, these songs, which often quite specifically mock the idea of learning, furthering your education, or generally bettering your situation in society at all, only make perfect sense as a life plan for kids who, like the artists singing them, went on to become millionaire pop band members. For the rest of us, such a philosophy does not usually lead to much besides destitution.

However, such songs in the nonconformity sub-genre of pop music do confuse the issue by actually having a lot of arguably good messages in them. It is in fact valuable to not always perfectly conform, to have different and independent ideas, and to find one's own way. Indeed, our nation would not even exist to begin with without radicals in its history. But these songs don't seem to stop at that general message and go on to outright mock learning, working and other things of value. Some of the singers go so far as to sneer at their colleagues in school who went on to good colleges, as if this is their revenge in song against kids who did better than them early in life. There is something nasty and misleading in such subtexts in many versions of this type of song.

3. "Love will solve all, and love is all you need."

No it won't , and no it isn't. Love does not solve anything all by itself.

And in closing, I want you kids to get off my lawn. Thank you.

Rave

When dealing with such social ills as rioting, I often struggle to understand what is going on. I notice that I'm not the only one, as there is a tendency after such events to search for simple answers, or even spin things a certain way. As I mentioned in one of my earlier essays, there were a ton of responses to the Katrina disaster and related crimes and looting with much resulting debate that included both facts and myths about the disaster. Despite there not being a single confirmed murder or rape by civilians, I still commonly see people on the Internets insisting that post-Katrina events were an orgy of murders and rapes. In any case, the looting was certainly real enough, but some folks reacted by implying that this is to be expected when there are brown people in your city, a convenient and perhaps comforting explanation that keeps things simple.

Such notions are perhaps encouraged by other events such as the LA riots after the Lakers wins, where in video footage one can easily see young Hispanic men waving an over-sized Mexican flag in front of the violence (I'm sure Mexicans everywhere just loved being associated with kids rioting in the streets.), to what purpose I don't know, though there was actually a variety pack's worth of different races involved in those riots, including "whites." Not sure what Mexican nationalism has to do with a Lakers event anyway, but I do recall seeing some odd non-Canucks related t-shirts during the Vancouver riots too. Perhaps some folks take any media event and try to use it for their own ends. Just as some of the rioters and hangers on do this, so do bloggers and columnists after such events, trying to claim that the riots were "really" about this...or that politics related cause, or are somehow a reflection on the entire society.

When the Vancouver riots happen, people are less inclined to reach for the same explanations involving race, general notions of uncivilized Americans, and social divisions though, despite similar confirmed events, such as violence, property destruction, and looting. Some lean towards arguing that not much really happened and that what little did happen could happen in any big city. But with insurance claims for vehicle damage over the one hundred cars mark, obviously, something not very nice happened to quite a few cars that day, and though Miami lost the recent basketball championship, they did not have riots there the same evening. The local authorities suggest that the rioters were actually anarchists "posing" as fans. And some bloggers have suggested a lack of economic and social justice as the "root cause" of the rioting. But even as such claims are made, it makes national news that one of the people caught on film setting fire to a police car was actually a college-bound elite athlete with hopes of making the Canadian Olympic team. Mmm...I somehow doubt he was rioting on behalf of disenfranchised poor people or the general cause of anarchy.

Robbed of the chance during a Canadian riot to narrow matters down to race, some try to suggest a specific age group or even gender as being at the root of the troubles. But while the riots may have been led by young people, the overall age range seems varied and some of the looters were reportedly women robbing cosmetics from local stores.

Indeed, when watching footage of the riots, it doesn't even appear that people are all that angry at their team's loss. It's true that there was an outpouring of rage at the end of the game, but later misbehavior seemed surrounded by enthusiastic jumping up and down, and smiles and hooting and hollering that didn't much resemble the looks of real anger and desperation seen in riots over issues other than sports in other parts of the world. In the following days, people have been embarrassed by photos of themselves smiling while they set things on fire. Some of the authorities have encouraged this and have even openly suggested that employers and others should know of what these people did through social media, which brings up issues of an Internet mob mentality possibly replacing the street mob, as the family of that car burning athlete have reportedly had to flee their home in fear for their safety.

With all the coverage of the violence, the people who showed up later without invitation or pay to clean up the downtown area after the riots are not mentioned so often. But they were still there, selflessly and quietly trying to repair their city.

I have to wonder if rioting is just something human societies lean towards on occasion. As the author of the old book The Human Zoo points out in his famous sociology study, humans penned up in urban areas have a lot in common with animals kept in cages, from sudden bouts of frenetic activity at certain times, to violent crimes that happen less often or easily in smaller social settings than the urban sprawls we have today. For all our self awareness, we are living beings after all, and maybe being penned up all the time with our frustrations and fears being our most constant companions may contribute to bouts of suddenly bad things happening.

But I don't mean to do as other bloggers are doing and suggest one simple explanation. There were probably a variety of factors that combined to make events unfold as they did, alcohol having something to do with it. And I certainly don't mean to make excuses for anyone. Thinking about what it takes to build a business or buy a car should have been on the rioters' minds before they decided to smash and torch other peoples' stuff just for the hell of it. But still, you have to wonder what it is about humans that makes violence and destruction the way to go when letting loose on a weekend. I recall seeing friends getting drunk in their youth and suddenly deciding that throwing a television set off a balcony just to see it destroyed was a good idea, and a good time. Huh? Years later, I still don't get it. And if not understanding the appeal of random destruction makes me more of a geek, then so be it. I'm not sure I want to be cool after seeing the latest riots.

Rave

The hubub over the probable hoax that many news outlets fell for regarding a supposed lesbian feminist blogger of Syrian-American citizenship and heritage (she claimed to be born in Virginia) in Syria during the uprisings there, has left me amused that the press is only just now being introduced to something we netizens have been dealing with since this Internet thing got rolling.

The "Syrian lesbian" blogger of the "Gay Girl in Damascus" blog that various news outlets had been giving so much attention to lately for some reason, perhaps due to the reportedly clever and skilled wiritng in the blog, had posted supposed photos of herself that I found surprisingly youngish looking for someone who claimed to be about 36 years old. Granted 36 is still relatively young and people age differently anyway, but still, this seemed a bit much.

Sure enough, the photos were actually of a woman who was about 26 years old, at the time of the photos, who was a Londoner who had no relation to the blogger. The photo swap thing is nothing new to those of us who have seen this sort of phony before, the temptation to post younger and more attractive pics than one's own must be strong for those who maintain an on-line persona and/or want to perpetrate a hoax that depends on Web charisma.

What's more, NPR has found on-line friends who report that they noticed her IP was closer to Scotland than Syria, but were told that this was just because she was using proxies to block her actual location for security reasons. Suspiciously though, in one of her blog entries she asked about grad schools available in...Scotland. Someone going by the same name had also been publishing a blog back in 2007 that was self-described as including both fact and fiction. Mmm...

To be fair to all the possibilities out there, yes, it's possible that this person is "real" in so far as being a lesbian blogger in Syria, and just didn't want to use their real name (understandably), made up a more colorful background and exploiting a supposedly American heritage plus more attractive photos for herself on Facebook, and then continued to blog from Syria. But I think the truth is more likely to involve a Scottish address, little or no connection to America (one of the supposedly American towns she referenced in her blog turned out to have no zip code), no current living in Syria, and a very different age and appearance, and perhaps even gender, than the person described on "her" blog.

As I mentioned, this is nothing new to Netizens. I recall even way back in the day that Furrymuck enjoyed a particularly nasty hoax involving some guy claiming to be someone dying of cancer, who was lavished with sympathy and attention by various muckers at the time. Personally, I had always felt that something was not quite...right about it. And I actually felt guilty about feeling that way when I supposedly should have been more friendly and sympathetic.

Turned out that my misgivings might have been on the mark after all though, when one of the admins investigated and quickly discovered that the person described to us did not exist. Oh, and if you are starting to think this was another sad story of someone just needing a little love and using falsehoods to get attention, I should mention that the username the hoaxer used turned out to be some French slang term for "shit." Oh, this person was having cruel fun at the expense of the hearts of others alright, make no mistake. But all's fair when it's for the lulz, right? This is just the Internet and nobody is responsible for anything they do here, right?

Ok, maybe not. Some people are trying to take a consolation prize by claiming that the Syrian blogger hoax at least drew attention to the cause, but that cause and situation of unrest already had front page coverage and didn't really need the phony story of a supposedly courageous blogger to draw further attention, attention that could now turn negative as people realize they were fooled and may start to wonder what else is false in this age of twitter revolutions and Facebook heroes. This stunt could cause real harm by way of a phony hero for the cause she supposedly supported. Ultimately, the real truth matters, not just what we would like to believe. The Internet is just another form of communication, it doesn't carry with it a magical zone of zero responsibility. Like all communications, we are responsible for the ones we make. While that reality shouldn't be used to chill free speech, it's something we should all at least keep in mind.

As you may have noticed, while I draw on some of my distant experiences of the past, I don't talk much about my current life on the Internets aside from mentioning my line of RL work in passing and roughly where I live and the local events and politics. While this is partly because I have an impulse towards privacy, and never fully understood the netizen tendency towards sharing all on the Web, all these pretend people also come to mind. If I can't prove anything I am describing on here, what's the point of describing it in detail? There are actually quite a few things from my life that I have not mentioned here because I was afraid nobody would believe me, even though they were true stories. What's the use if you can't "prove" anything on the Net?

We artists, at least the ones not smudging photos and then pretending they are paintings, or tracing stuff, anyway, that being a different kind of hoax in itself, should perhaps be content to present our creations, and are not obliged to serve up our lives as well. Not that there is anything wrong with sharing and, perhaps hypocritically, I love reading about y'all's lives on here, but I just don't want to share quite that much myself, at least not beyond mentioning general stuff from my life in passing.

(By the way, artists, please share more intimate details of your personal lives, and post more YouTube videos, photos of your art work spaces, and links to your twitter feed and MyFace pages and stream more of your live work on art etc. I love that stuff because it helps me to stal, um, observe you and get to know the story behind your work. Or something like that. Don't expect me to share too though...I'm shy.)

I suppose that the press agencies discovering the joy of false identities and creations on the Net is, if anything, overdue. For too long they have run with whatever they thought sounded nice or would be attention grabbing, treating blogs and rumors as if they were automatically factual. It's time to wake up and smell the bullshit. Here on the Net, just as we can't always trust the press, the press can't always trust us.

Rave

I am live streaming some work on a couple of pieces. Come watch if you are interested. Link:
http://www.watchtail.com/view.php?v=Ravewolf

Scott Adams, the creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, has always had some...problems...dealing with the realities of the modern Internet. Back in the relatively early days of the Net, a certain web comic author included some copies of Dilbert strips with obscenely altered texts in one of his own comics. Adams sent that author a simple note in e-mail that read only: "Do you want to go to jail?"

Later, Adams started making controversial statements in his blog and dealt with the backlash by doing the old delete and run routine when things got too hot. And now, most recently, he got caught on the Metafilter site anonymously white knighting for himself. The heads of the site chastised him publicly over this and claimed that he had violated understood rules of Net forums by doing the anonymously supporting yourself against critics thing.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about it all. Adams comes off as a bit of a goober who has trouble handling criticism, and perhaps the Net in general. Also, his arguments on the Internets sound a bit like: "I'm right, and you are all wrong, cause you are all idots who don't 'get it', and I'm a genius etc.", you know, like how someone would argue if they were a very typical Net newbie. Which is odd coming from someone who is supposedly so hip to the twists of the modern world and geek culture etc. He even tends to fall back on a lame version of the old "I was just trolling." excuse when he gets a particularly large amount of egg on his face after one of the more ill advised posts. He tends to go: "It's my job to be interesting as a writer, which is why I say outlandish things." etc. Um, you aren't known "as a writer" for your blogging to begin with, dude, and everybody knows it. Your job is that of a cartoonist. But anyway, all and all, he is not really winning at the Internet.

But putting that aside for a moment, I wonder what he did that was so wrong? I mean, fans get to attack us artists with all manner of slander, do so anonymously, and outnumber any artist ten to one. Yet when an artist uses the same Internet tools of anonymity, even all by themselves, he or she is told this is unethical? Mmm... It all seems a little convenient.

Yes, one could argue that such problems simply come with the territory of fame and fortune. But these days, you don't have to be full of that fortune stuff to be Internet famous. Some folks just have a name for themselves for making little bits of art for no money, or for posting popular rants, or whatever. Should all those famous yet non-rich and non-powerful people be constantly at the total mercy of the entire Internet without the opportunity to defend themselves using all the same tricky means that the Internet will no doubt use to attack them?

I think it's a reasonable question, and one we may need to ask more often as the Internet generation grows up. When polled on whether or not it was appropriate for people to be publicly wishing death on the underage girl who made that infamous "Friday" music video, most of those polled said it was perfectly ok to shower her with abuse. This is the way the Internet generation thinks, which leads me to wonder how one-sided battles between creators and fans should be allowed to be. Is it truly anything goes? Not in print, not in letters, not on the television, or the radio, where rules about slander and such apply, but just on the Internet, our own special place for no rules about anything ever?

I recall hearing an NPR report in which the experts being asked by reporters about an incident in which a politician sued in an attempt to get past the anonymity of a Net critic said that the politician should use the Internet to fight instead of the courts, suggesting that the proper way to deal with Net attacks was on the Net's own terms. Sounds nice, but what are those terms, exactly? Ones in which known figures are attacked by large bullying groups who have the automatic advantage of anonymity that the attacked person does not have. And when they do try to use anonymity of their own, the same anonymous attackers claim they are being the unethical ones, with backup by admins. Knowing the identity of one's accuser used to be thought of in some circles as a basic right in a democratic society. The Internet has turned that idea on its head as we delve into new territory.

Don't get me wrong, I love anonymity on the Net, cherish free speech, and don't want either to change. And I hate it when fans insist that any criticism of artists must be motivated by jealousy and that everyone should just shut up and never say anything critical. This fandumb had enforced silence for way too long, and it didn't help anyone except for the group's worst miscreants. But the way we have come full circle and the Internet is now constantly hyper-critical does raise some questions for me too.

All that said, I find the WAY that Adams, and others in the media who have been caught doing this in the past, went about using anonymity disturbing, and perhaps revealing. Few of the media personalities or reporters who get caught doing this get caught making reasonable, calm and truly thoughtful posts. Instead, like Adams, they get caught making insulting, self aggrandizing and over the top posts that seem more driven by an eagerness to counterattack against their critics than to use anonymity to make valid points free of the automatic drama and perhaps overabundant attention that would come with being a celebrity poster.

In other words, the people who do the anonymous self defense thing tend to be the kind of people who respond to loud cretins on the Net by allowing themselves to strike back as loud cretins themselves, with the cover of anonymity so as to not have to take responsibility for it under their usual handle. This is not an uncommon reaction among celebrities and reporters who did not grow up on the Net as much as the Internet generation did. They just don't seem to know what to make of the schoolyard style exchanges typical of a Net environment ruled by insane man-children, and respond by freaking out in kind.

In a way, I don't blame them. Only on the Internet do people who don't even know you feel they have a god given right to "call you out" on the crime of being you, and literally demand that you respond and imply that there is something wrong with you, and not with their own screaming selves of course, if you don't. In any other venue, this would be the babbling crazy person who the celebrity quickly walks past after their stage performance on the way to the limo. But on the Internet, where all parties seem weirdly equal and even the most insane rants get more than equal air time, celebs suddenly feel that maybe they do have to respond to the screaming village idiot after all, and start to discover that they too are human enough to start sounding like one themselves as they begin to scream too. The Internet puts us all in positions we would never normally be in.

Still, if they used anonymity to elevate the discussion, or even just get a word in without being auto-attacked by the angry fans they are responding to due to their identity, I would be more understanding about this sort of thing. But no, they just use their anonymous smurf accounts to wallow in the mud with their most crude attackers, who they really shouldn't be caring so much about to begin with. Adams had a tendency to have his avatar go about saying what a "genius" Adams was and other lame and delusional things straight from his id. This is disappointing.

Do they have a right to do it though? I think so. If anonymous can do anything at any time without any rules, then even those with some fame need to be allowed a level playing field that operates on those same terms.

But would I ever do this kind of thing myself? Honestly...while one can't know how one will respond until in that situation, and I have not been randomly attacked by loud cretins on Net forums just yet, I doubt that I would. In any case, I would certainly not use a smurf account to make crude attacks that I would not want to be seen making under my usual handle, like so many of the famous people have been caught doing. That wouldn't be using anonymity for honesty and open communication, it would be using it as cover for cowardly and juvenile behavior, merely lowering yourself to the level of the most base critics.

Anonymity raises ethical concerns for fans and artists alike though. Some of the more, well, "troubled" artists have been caught using smurf accounts to attack their own friends. Others use them to dodge making good on commissions. Obviously, such behavior is just wrong, not to mention creepy.

Do you set ethics related limits on how you use anonymity, or is the only natural way to handle the Net to just go with it and use all the weapons in your arsenal? I don't claim to have the only right answers to this, I am just posting my gut reactions and thinking about the issue out loud.

And Scott Adams, if you feel like contributing something here, please don't feel you need to do so anonymously. You can call us all idiots and declare your genius in person, it's really not a problem. ^_^

Rave

I am live streaming some work on a couple of pieces. Come watch if you are interested. Link:
http://www.watchtail.com/view.php?v=Ravewolf