http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2007111.....ristmasoffbeat

What the HELL!?

I just feel I should point something out here for those of you where are going on about inflationary recession (true), and big cars (true), and other varying degrees of pop culture rudeness (All true). While it may be "in" to bitch and whine about gas prices the people who have a car as status symbol, and the people who are whining because they can't fill their Hummer, and even more in to bitch about people who are bitching, they aren't the people being hardest hit by this. So yes, please do pontificate in your little happy tower in whatever ridiculously smaller country you're in where the government has evolved to a point where it functions with something resembling order. Those of us blue collar and working class families who can't get by because we can't get to work, or to college, or daresay go to the hospital because while this gas hike goes on our wages are neither increasing nor are our other tangible bills in the form of rent, electricity, and food are decreasing will just have to continue to suffer in silence. I'm glad its so very easy to point fingers and make broad generalizations about a complicated problem from perfect safety and anonymity, I wish I had that kind of luxury.

Has it ever struck anyone how untouchable minor celebrities are? I'm not talking about people who show up on TV or in Movies, they have handlers and big scary security guards and nine tmes out of ten would rather just be left alone by naive pedagogues like myself who'd just like to honestly make a friend and maybe pick up a few pointers. You know, the non stalkerly kind of behavior artists and art students used to engage in.

But no, in our fandom there seems to be the inability to look at a famous furson let alone talk to them in any meaningful way without going through the teeth pulling expense of hitting up a con, dodging its manifold horrors, and finding the right person. Let alone if you get lucky enough to share a few words on the side online 'when they're in a good (read: giving) mood. I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into this or just don't get out enough, but I really dislike feeling like a little island surrounded by people who are somehow more important than me who don't want to talk to me. Maybe it's a leftover resentment of high school cliques.

I read some comments lately by some retard on some space on some picture on FA to the effect that love is dead and it's all about fucking. That's as much directionality as you're going to get as to where these conversations lie. However I will say this about that.

To say that love is dead is to imply then that society is dead because, while much of modern life is geared towards work and warfare, it is equally aimed at finding and holding on to something special to us be it a person or thing. Love is such a complicated subject, reflected in so many ways like the starburst of colored light through a prism that there are many things that make up its constituency and only a true fool would denote it as slain in its totality. Perhaps romance is dead. Perhaps chivalry and the naive dream of decency and kindness to one another for the sheer sake of kindness and decency are walking wounded and mortally so. But love? Love was not even understood by the Grecian phillosophers, and no snarky comment by someone whose own quest for acceptance has gone awry will put a chink in the armor of amore'.

The French of the dark ages, where my college studies lie currently, describe love as a folly. Comprable to the denouncing of romantic love on the greater asian continent in favor of platonic love among brothers, to those first monarchies that set the tone for much of the western world to follow, love was and is a beautiful madness that infects the mind and steals both reason and strength. Its victims are both empowered by it, and yet can die merely from its loss. Such a ravenous yet beautiful predatory force, walking among us and making us do such crazy things all in the name of an ideal cannot simply be slain by word and left in the street to rot. Ideas are of a sterner stuff than that.

Rather I would say that it is cynicism which is on the rise. In the age of postmodernism our willfull ignorance, our elitism, and above all our lack of color and poetry make us powerless to comprehend love let alone drag it into the field of combat and see what makes it tick. Love is too big for small wretched minds. "But its the internetz" you say. "People only say they love what they have not seen, and then they just fuck when they meet". And perhaps you are right. Perhaps they do. But that is not a reflection of love. Love, too potent, too profound, too ancient, to be restrained by the simple mundane human act of sex, is not in those words what one rails against. What this person actually speaks of is the ethics of lust, the immorality of passions unchecked. As someone who, having met someone online, loved them, met them, and did not have sex with them, but I continue to love that person deeply, I can say with experience that what deliniates lust and love is adherence to principle. If you love at distance, lust at range, and then depart with callousness, then you were never in love to begin with and your lust has left you bereft of principles. However, if you love truly, lust passionately, and retain honesty then truly you are one who can understand the whiles of love and those with whom you share your connection are truly blessed to know you. All else, as they say, is shadows and dust.

After much tribulation, a week of vomitting and an inability to keep food down, two days ago my mother went into the hospital. She seemed to be recovering but last night she went into intensive care and today my father and I went to visit her. She's still alive, but they have her on artificial resperation with all kinds of tubes and so fourth going in and out of her.

They still do not, as of yet, know the problem but she will probably lose the other leg in the next couple days if, that is, she survives to see the next couple days. I am keeping a posetive outlook, as are the doctors, but then that is what's expected of one in this situation. So I can't really give you an exact estimate of what might happen.

Well, for my part, I know I haven't been the best friend to all of you all the time. But I want you all to know whatever happens I won't disappear on you because of this. As best I can I will seek to retain an online presence to keep in contact with you all.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/li.....n_page_id=1965

I'd like to get paid both for being this stupid and derivative

I've submitted work to a magazine. If they publish it, go from the nebulous realm of writer to published author. Here's hoping.

And my scanner is broken so I can't show it to you! Six! SIX characters on one page!

:user:Arklyod:user:, :user:kamyories:user; , and :user:zumzumfoxy:user: are owned by their respective players.

Recent considerations that have come into my head: firstly I'm a 25 year old college student, shouldn't I be writing something and making money? Secondly, if I should be making money how can I parley this into my avocation for the fandom despite being, in my opinion, a sub par artist to those who generally make sufficient capital in this genre and a writer whom is still refining his craft? And thirdly, how exactly am I going to do all this in conjunction with my love of heroic fantasy and darker, grittier, subtexts which the fandom desperately needs to prove it isn't still funny animals and lite fiction?

These are the things I think.

Oh and I want a bagel too!

My scanner is dead pending replacement, that is all.

Selene, a black wolf whom has been my friend for ten years and whose image graces this very gallery, has suffered a loss; her mother. To that I encourage everyone to comment here and pass on your words of support. Every time you think about loved ones who have passed ensures they live forever in paradise, and they will be there waiting for you on the final day.

The days are long. The nights are hot. And I suffer. So I clean. And in my cleaning pictures unable to survive in my cramped conditions, some of which have never seen the light of day, are lost. Thankfully this is sufficient excuse for an explosion of new drawings.

I was just looking at this again:

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/517026/

When an idea hit? Why doesn't someone do a portfolio called Gods of Rock using ancient pagan gods in a metal band? Anubis is already pulling lead guitar, and who else could do the drums but the one and only Norse god of thunder?

In case anyone has ever wondered why I'm such a bitch. Why I drag on so long about things and ideas that seem frivilous or why I espouse that people should be intelligent and actually think about what they're doing. Here's an example why.

The state of washington wants to kill my mother.

We're working class poor. We don't do drugs. We obey the law. But: we make too much money, sucked away by bills, rent, and other overhead, to actually see any of it because we like to eat at least three times once a day. My mom is sick with a condition that will not go away, does not get better, cannot be forgotten about and requires daily care. Meaning time I could spend listening to music or out acting like a jack ass is instead spent at home slavishly caring for someone else because I give half a shit. My dad, oppressive manic depressive asshat that he is, must be given some credit for busting his ass forty eight hours a week at the age of fifty (mom is fifty five) giving sweat and blood in a factory just to make ends meat while I, disabled person on SSI aspire to go to college, get the fuck out of here, get a job that actually pays the bills and maybe just maybe be successful in the scope of my own kids won't go through the same shit I do.

And now the state of washington, that draconian beaucratic monstrosity, wants to take away the drugs that keep my mom alive just because it doesn't like to pay for them but would be much happier if she was perpetually confined to health care at some retirement home. How dare her family want to enjoy her presence and perhaps indulge her need for intellectual stimulation beyond matlock.

And you wonder why I take a malicious self serving glee in poking the assholes around here on Furaffinity and other venues who have the audacity to think themselves my superior just because they're more comfortable.

Well that's the second time I've ever been blocked on Furaffinity. Both times I find it interesting how strongly people over react to either differences in opinion or criticism. Whatever happened to freedom of speech and the respect of being heard? You don't have to like what someone says, but you should at least listen, who knows you might end up sharing more in common with them than you think. Now mind, there are those recently on this journal I've been quite venomous with, even vulgar. But that was always the last straw, the FA form of asking someone to leave your house, and even then I don't slap a restraining order on them.

POWER TO THE HOOF AND HORN!
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!
SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!

...That is all, we now return you to your regularly scheduled imperial watching. This has been a presentation of Imperial public accesss, where free is the last thing on your mind, up next head shaving tips with brother mathias the purifier; how to look good and serve the Emperor-may-he-live-forever's will without being a vain heretic.

I was paging through some comic pages someone or other did and I have to comment here. Has anyone else notices the preponderance of hyper powerful heroes and villains, as though power makes things better? Anyone who has really watched Dragonball Z or read Superman with an outsider's view probably knows to what I refer. These characters, defined by their powers, tap seemingly limitless reserves of superhuman energies to defeat ever increasingly potent cariactures of evil with equally redundant qualifiers that limit them in ways the hero is not limited. Is this a sentiment that has grown out of the percieved lack of empowerment we have in this day and age? Is it poor writing? Is it just people having fun and I, once again, am over thinking things?

I am reminded of an older class of heroic fiction, written and otherwise. Whether the characters had powers or not, whether they were super wealthy or not, what defined them was not their capabilities but their willingness to suffer for a greater good. What greatness is a hero who is only a hero by the definition he is the protaganist of the story? How can we sympathize with the brooding antihero if he does not suffer for the cruelties of his past life? What worth is a victory easily won? In this way I think there is a thin line between ultra powerful characters and simple base bloodlust. And its a worse sin in those venues like X-men who attempt to fake the patina of true weight with impotent whining. I am not impressed when upper middle class assholes in a mansion with advanced technology have to stop and cry because someone called them names on the street.

I'm not saying heroes can't be happy. God knows I get a smile on my face when the under dog gets the girl. But as shakespeare said, therein lies the rub. The best heroes are the underdog, and it takes more than power to overcome unbeatable odds, it takes a will and a purity of spirit most of these ultra powerful beings have never had and never will.

When considering the question of what does it mean to be an Anthro there are several questions which must be considered, each of these easily summarized with the perjorative 'where do I stand'? Do I, as a representative of my group, espouse freedom and creativity without malice or censorship? Do I attempt to straddle the difficult balance between an alternative lifestyle and more traditional values that do not extend to me the same sympathy and understanding as they would expect me to extend? Do I instead shun everything that does not conform to my singular world view? Each of these is but a matter of social, ethical, and moral stance. And on the dynamic realm of the internet, these things are paramount because there is no physiological, economic, or sociological perview that can limit or render the opinion of the individual as redundant except for ones own innate idiocy. On the internet, all fools are created equal.

It is with this in mind that I must consider the current trend in what I consider 'my fandom' of self depreciation. Moving outside of the realm of angst ridden bad taste, it is becoming distinctly more prevalent to denigrate the fandom as a whole through words and self serving ideological arguments as to how 'the fandom has changed'. I wouldn't be so foolish as to assert there is nothing wrong with Anthro as it is. Fursons come, fursons go, some people are kinky, some people choose to share it, but in the end I have been and continue to be exposed to negative stimulus I probably didn't want. The difference being, where others increasingly choose to lash out and accuse the collective for the actions of the few, I remain mum on the subject. As an anthropormorphic enthusiast, I'm private. I don't wear a fursuit. I don't stand on a soap box and shout for equal treatment as a fandom, at least not overtly, and I don't particularly care if some idiot with an affection for spongy rubber playings runs around waving his protruberance in the air as long as he doesn't hit me with it.

Yet there are those for whom this isn't enough. Those who appear to have lost their sense of objectivity to the degree they fail to recognize that the reason outsiders deride our little society is because as outsiders they instinctively seek out the most base and unpleasant aspects of our group in order to 'expose' it for the dangerous radical subfaction it is. These elitists, high in their comfortable computer protected towers, see a public image crying out for repair and take it upon themselves to do just that by attemtping to ostracize those elements of a group they feel are unwanted. And, in doing so, they become social pariahs. Nobody wants to be told he, she, or they are a degenerate. Everyone wants to be the one making the accusations.

But then, isn't that the point? In my experience the current social trend outside the fandom is empowerment through the status of being a dependent. If everyone is special, as the best self help books tell us, then everyone is deserving if not requiring of special consideration and care. Don't we all have slight but manageable mental illnesses, poorly defined, that need medication? Don't we all have some desperate problem that requires others feel sorry for us? Don't we all have some cause for which we must be the tortured martyrs, misunderstood and dejected, but secure in the knowledge of our divine justice. The sense that, when we are powerful or successful or more importantly when someone else has lost something they hold dear, we will be proven right. Isn't it sad that we must all be neurotic, and we must share our neurosis at the expense of others, to fit in? Maybe the fandom hasn't changed, but the reasons for blowing the whistle have.

My most recent peices attack pretty savagely what I describe as 'fashion goths', and that demands some explaination. The Gothic Movement as we know it is in fact a subset of the Victorian Romantic Movement. Some of the best horror based fiction to ever be written came out of that time including Frankenstien: Prometheus Unbound by Mary Shelly, The Vampyre by Pollidori, and still other peices such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as the whole of Edgar Allen Poe's perverse look at madness and necrophillia. But even that movement is derived from a resurgence of interest in the asture and beautiful architechture from whence Gothic draws its name. The greatest churches and castles in the world are either directly Gothic, or done in a subsequent later Gothic styles.

Stephen King in his book Danse Macabre describes horror fiction as having three primary levels and I use my own words here because, despite owning a copy, I cannot divine the exact text: The sensation, the phantasm, and gore. In most gothic expressions gore is nonexistant. The Victorians never bled, just ask them, and goo is usually out of place no matter how Lovecraftian your elder god. Hence Gothic hinges on the first two: the sensation of fear unseen and the literal apperance of the horror itself.

The first is entirely based in the Romantic Movement. Gothic does not use bright new light bulbs. It uses warm candlelight. The smell of roses. The taste of wine or absinthe. To the Gothic, fear arises from entering a darkened room only to discover that in an entirely warm and inviting space there is a single blackish splotch of blood, fresh enough to be wet, old enough to fill the room with copper, ominiously spreading like a diseased cancer across the persian rugs with a mind of its own and no discernable source. But when your itinerent hero blinks its gone and he is left to question his sanity.

The second is the stuff of old monster movies. We feel the shiver of physical horror when the zombies, no matter how cheesy, pound at the walls of a grainy black and white farm house and groan for brains. While the heroes inside tear themselves apart over race and politics, outside a force that knows no such boundries grows ever stronger, ever hungry, and he quiver as we see a grinning face with glazed eyes lick its chops as we might looking upon a big fat steak.

Note at no time do I make mention of fancy dress clothes or happy hippy get togethers. No salons. No pretentious dinner parties where the bugoise gather to drink cheap liquor and share badly written prose or talk garbage philosophy like we know our Sartre and Kant when we really don't. I speak of visceral fear, cold sweat, the stink of the grave and the pain of torn flesh.

Those I denounce as Emo, or Fashion Goths, for lack of a subgroup of their own cling instead to the rusting carcass of the Gothic Movement. They are not depressed, they're grumpy, they aren't angry, they're moody. And they aren't gothic, they're bitchy. And they aren't even good at being bitches. To the world at large, because of Emo, mundanes think that gothic is some kind of fashion specific style; if only we had enough white face makeup and eyeliner, we could be goths too! Then we could ostracise all those jocks who didn't let me hang out with them and be popular!

BULLSHIT! If you were a loser before you're even more of a loser now for making others feel like shit just so you can belong to an exclusive club. It only strikes me as more offensive when the Emo bitches doing the ostracising are anthros, a subgroup demeaned enough as it is without turning on each other.

I am currently accepting victi- err..willing participants for a new World of Darkness game that includes elements of Starcraft in celebration of Starcraft II...that means humans, vampires, werewolves, protoss, and zerg people! (no mages or prometheans until I gots me the books, sorry kids) I know it's cheesy, but I'm telling you it'll be awesome.

I just got FF VI Advance, the re release of the Super Nintendo american Final Fantasy III for Gameboy Advance. Be prepared for FFIII fanart and cosplay pics after I finish some little bits I owe folks. Interestingly enough the version of Kefka I had in my head and as drawn from the game art at the end of FFIII is totally wrong to the combination kabuki-seventeenth century noble-clown that 'Cefka' actually looks like, but I like mine better.

Mwa ha ha!

Looking for Artist.

Wanted, one artist willing to work pro-bono on a piece of sonic the hedgehog (no, I didn't stutter) comic fiction written by me. Must be willing to draw non sexual violence, drama, and gore...or something.

Are you an artist?

Are you a gamer?

Do you have free time that could be better filled, and yet you have a sick twisted desire to pretend to be sick and twisted?

Your local gothic imagination specialist is looking for fellow role playing game players for a couple of things he's running, so send me a note.

Dictionary.com, since my American Heritage Dic*tion*ar*y third edition seems to lack the world, defines Intelligentsia as a plural noun. Intellectuals considered as a group or class, especially as a cultural, social, or political elite. To my mind, as a writer who would become an author and one day join the intelligentsia of opinionated phillosopher scribes who fill their days writing and talking about writing with other writers, we called it a clique in High School. Clique is a noun, or verb when used without object, describing a small exclusive set or group of people. The important words there are elite and exclusive. Elite indicates the best or choice of anything considered collectively such as a group or class of people. Exclusive has a plethora of definitions but most principly to this conversation the admitting of only members of a socially restricted or very carefully selected group.

My question is, considering these words and their meaning, when exactly did having an opinion become the only requirement to be an intellectual? Some of us, like yours truly, work hard to form well rounded informed opinions or if we have to be narrow minded at least strive to recognize why we're narrow minded. However, with the freedom of the internet in all its software pirate put up a web page and whine into your blog glory, there is a growing class of people furry and not who seem to think that because they have the capacity to type on a keyboard they have something worthwhile to say.

The world is full of writers. People writing their exceptionally boring life stories down with sweaty palms on crumpled paper to give some publisher a headache, or because his or her brother's cousin's uncle's monkey has a magazine they would just die to publish it in and by and large they accomplish nothing because the sad fact is their lives aren't interesting and their phraseology is inelegant. Very few of us become authors, fewer still make money at it, and of that cream of the crop even fewer become hyper wealthy at it. Therefore writing on the internet may as well be mental masturbation because it serves no one but the self, much like this journal serves to voice my opinion now, it appeals to no audience, and it appeases no body capable of returning funds for its production.

And yet the question persists in my mind who empowered these mental giants, these Ben & Jerry's socrates, who self supposed themselves worthy of intellectual thought? Immanuel Kant said "All is nothing", and these people are exactly that; nothing. They do nothing. They produce nothing. They bring no light or understanding to their world, and they drag the rest of us down into their mediocrity by their sheer inability to grasp the worth of a simple image. Like the priest who has never felt the hand of his god, they give half hearted prayers and offer insincere aid. Like the bored housewife or wandering husband they blame others for the faults that are at base theirs and hurt others with their mindless malaise. Instead of challenging the world that does not care about their existence they instead wallow in crepulence and waste whatever talents they might have had making wry commntaries littered with alphanumerics on an internet forum and hold themselves like men on high because they have wrought chains of heuristics and called it fact.

And they hate. They hate themselves. They hate others. And especially they hate those who have earned that which they did not have the courage to grasp. They hate the true intellectual for the shining light of his reason. They hate the philosopher for his poetry. They hate the singer and the scientist for the beauty of their form and they seek to obscure them behind ever increasing layers of beauracracy and accusory lies in order to make themselves feel better.

And when these oppressed masses. These gifted people desperately seeking a place of solace in a world of indifference. When they explode in violence because violence is the only art of expression we have left them. When they march of the High Schools that destroy thought, the college campuses that offer slaps on the wrist to bullies and tut tut at their own system while accepting large grants with grinning bovine faces. When they turn guns on the government and then on themselves. Then this intelligentsia of the indigent are shocked. Looking on in mute horror they gape and guffaw and snort. They denounce and they debate and they dissemble until responsibility is lost somewhere between madness and media but never lies on the heads of the guilty parties. Even the person who took up the firearm and now lies dead and dejected from his ineffectual cry for help because he could not find a rooftop high enough from which to give his barbaric yawp to the world. George Bernard Shaw tells us Assassination is the extreme form of censorship, after all.

The wisdom of the world is at your fingertips. It lies not in epileptic flickery and java-based jittery. It is hidden in plain sight, within the text of books and history. Even fantasies and fictions bear their weight when read if the quality of the thought is pure because they do not only offer escape from the cold and cruel universe but they express perspectives on the way the world is as well as the way the world should be. Those who feel they have opinions and the will to vent them should take the time to consider them before they are formed, and when spoken, should take the time to speak those intents clearly and soundly. Theodore Roosevelt said that man should speak softly and carry a big stick. If one wishes to speak softly, he should be assured what he speaks is worth having been said.