So many artists I follow have posted intent to leave for other sites, oftentimes nuking their galleries behind them in the process, out of fear of being ruined by this Barnum effect of a rule change.

Even if it gets rolled back, they're probably not going to return.

What am I supposed to do about this, start paying attention to InkBunny? Which famously has the thing that FA is so desperate to keep off its own site it decided to accept greatly multiplying false positives? I already hate that I'm subscribed to two different anime streaming services (one of which has a Firestick app that doesn't even recognize the play control buttons on the remote), you think I like having to manully keep up with two different sites? I can't keep that pace up, I have a job. As well as hate how many artists seem to post their NSFW to Twitter, which is having its own freakin' false positives headache right now.

Like, the charge is garbage. They seemed to have removed context examination altogether in favor of solely anatomy, which is so stupid I don't even have the words. It's too open to abuse (especially with how I hear the mods have been reacting to it on Discord), it leaves too many holes where characters that are actually minors are subjected to fetishes, and I don't have a third thing because the first two are already guillotine-worthy.

Hate this. So much.

A "clarification" on the 2.7 update has elicited responses such as this and this.

I don't think I've been this absolutely livid since my fanfic riffing days. I don't have words for how upset this makes me. This actively feels like being thrown out on the street with nowhere else to really go - and for many artists, it is.

For crying out loud, stuff like Eevee and Shinx shouldn't even count since since the policy is specifically against humanoids! Including the center thing of that pic by the creator of the site!

Look, if FA wants to kick me, they can come and do it to my face. No self-ticketing, no nothing. If they're so serious about it, they can clense their damn site by hand.

So as I understand it, the latest news update is an attempt to loose the thousand-year loli from the site (I don't know why they included "vampire," most of the ones I've seen tend to be demons or goddesses).

Like, I get it, but even with the addendums to it, the main qualifier is seeing if characters are "presented as children," via anatomy and context. Even aside that's not how some art styles work, for this to work, the moderators doing this to have the mental maturity and professional wherewithal to fairly evaluate a work's presentation to determine if someone in a pic is a child.

It requires mental maturity and professional wherewithal.

On the Internet.

The last picture linked here counts as removable. "When presented as children," my left foot. Baby Yoshis are actual things, and those look nothing like them, so they can't be it. Can the Koopas there be interpreted as children? No, not really. Only if you think child anatomy is "anyone smallish and with any amount of chub," and "smallish" is a stretch here considering Koopas are usually as tall as Mario (and Yoshis are taller than him). If someone is particularly off-tilt for whatever reason, it's a coin toss whether or not they would interpret the Koopas in that picture as children.

But that it's a coin toss is the problem. What this shows is that whether or not a pic is allowed or not under this policy is determined entirely by the whim of the moderator that looks at it at that moment, as opposed to plainly-stated objective criteria. As shown by the entirety of human history, people with power + vague rules that don't strictly determine whether something or not is subject to that power = power being abused. And given what I've heard about how art's treated by this policy even before this update and how staff is reacting to backlash to this news, history's repeating itself. Add no apparent oversight or appeal to prevent a mod from dropping a pic and banning the user using this rule just because they don't like them today, and it's a hot mess all around.

For the love of Arceus, this is the only art site I'm even on with any regularity anymore, and I like smols and shortstacks. I don't regularly draw NSFW, but the two not-general pieces I have are of a smol and a shortstack. Cassandra and Solandis are not children. I don't think either of them look like children (not even Cassandra's original adopt image, nor Solandis' original ref). But it doesn't matter what I think they look like. If they're reported and the mod that gets the ticket thinks they look like children even though they clearly don't, I'm basically going to get accused of something I didn't do.

And I hate being accused of something I didn't do.

I don't like what this change could do. It feels like when changes at work primarily screw over my favorite role there (which is like over half of them). I think Elon Musk selling Twitter is more likely than this working out the way staff thinks it will. I don't have a real conclusion, this just sucks.

At long last, the major arcana cards for the Adoptables Tarot project are done! It's been a ride, managing to get a good rhythm going and actually keeping to that once-a-week upload schedule in 2019 before getting a job that threw my entire groove off. But they're done now. 22 images drawn for the eventual printers! Only... 56 left to go! 28% completion! And each minor arcana is planned to have at least two characters! At least I'm better at drawing in Inkscape now???

So what's the plan for the minor arcana? The overall progress page covers what exactly the images will be of: the characters interacting in scenes, with the cast selected based on their major's element. Rank minors (Ace thru 10) will have characters whose element matches the suit's, and court minors (Page, Knight, Queen, and King) will have characters from not only that element, but also the one associated with the cooresponding rank in the Thoth deck (Page = earth, Knight = air, Queen = water, King = fire). The scenes will not necessarily match those in either the Rider-Waite or Thoth decks exactly, especially the court cards, though they will still incorporate each card's important symbolism.

Luckily, I ran the numbers, and there are exactly enough 2-characters pairings in the three suits with only five characters for each rank minor to have a unique combination. Of course, this means I have little room for error, and will have to figure out these character assignments before sketching any. Some have already been figured out from the relationships I want the characters to have. The description of the meanings of the major arcana were taken from a previous writing thing I was involved in, but I'll have to come up with ones for each of the minors. A lot of research will be done, but I managed it for the majors, I can manage it for this. I am trying a theme year of "completion," and want Adoptables Tarot to be one of those things I complete this year. Or at least one of the suits. Or all the research. Take any victory you can.

As for what will replace the character bios in the description... I'm leaving that a surprise for now~

In lieu of new years resolutions, I'm going to attempt to do a "Year of Completion" or at least a "Season of Completion," where I make a point of finishing things I've started. There are a lot of those. Adoptable Tarot is one of them; I'm vectorizing the last of the major arcana now. Learning how to drive is another one. Reading the light novels I've already purchased, including ones I've only read a bit of. You get the idea. Themes are meant to be flexible, so I won't make promises about what will result from it, but I'm hoping keeping a mind to making progress towards any goal will be able to help me trend my life experience up.

Each twenty-fifth speaks the tale bold
Dressed tinsel of silver and gold
But pass holly bough
For my concern now:
Dear God is it freakin'-ass cold

Also I need to get that last journal off my front page because that situation resolved itself like over a month ago.

Merry Christmas.

 moonlight-neo is currently homeless, and has been for a month now. A group of his friends on Discord, including me, are doing his best to keep him up, but it's taken its toll both mentally and financially.

The full details are here: https://ko-fi.com/Post/Helping-Neo-M4M86Y9P2

If you have the change to spare, please consider donating to one of our Ko-Fis (with Neo's linked within and on his FA page) - all money going to mine will be used to help keep him afloat, and that's a promise. He also has a Patreon that he didn't put on his profile, if you're more comfortable with that.

If I'm going to be using FA journals again, I might as well put them to good use.

The Story Engine: Deck of Worlds is the sequel product to The Story Engine, a deck of different cards designed to create story prompts from infinitely-combinable cues to help you get ideas flowing for all kinds of creative projects. In addition to the main deck, extra expansions and boosters add genre-specific cues to the assortment, from fantasy, horror, mythology, science fiction, dystopian, cyberpunk, and more. Deck of Worlds is intended to do the same to get past the initial hurdles of worldbuilding, by suggesting landmarks in regions that have a past, present, and future, along with guidelines for building regions as big as a continent. The Kickstarter also has expansions and boosters in the works for the Deck of Worlds, as well as a new set of expansion and boosters for the original Story Engine and all-in-one containers for both decks with their add-ons, via stretch goals.

This Kickstarter is far from struggling - in fact, it's already well-hit every stretch goal I wanted within less than a week. But I love this product, and I want to tell people about it. This sort of randomized prompt creator is the sort of thing that helps get the juices flowing at least enough to feel better even if I don't write anything from it. Where else could I get a plot for a crazy epic fantasy adventure by mixing elements of sci-fi, mythology, dystopia, and eldritch horror?

After some listless wandering yearnings for creative endeavors in recent weeks, I've finally gotten used enough to having a job that I can dedicate at least part of my "weekends" (Friday and Saturday) to picking Adoptable Tarot back up. I've already sketched the next card and will vectorize it next weekend. After that, I'll try to do a card a week, sketching on Friday and vectorizing on Saturday, though I'll still post them on Wednesdays due to what I have in mind for the descriptions of the Minor Arcana.

It'll be good to get back on this again. I like creating.

So there hasn't been any Adoptable Tarot updates for the last three weeks, and that's because I hadn't drawn any new pictures for it. I recently got a job in an Amazon fulfillment center, we're going through the claimed Peak due to all the Christmas shopping, and I'm still getting acclimated to it. Soon as I have a free weekend that isn't half co-opted by my parents, I'll do what I can.

So here's the project I talked about in that last journal entry over a year ago: the Adoptable Tarot project.

In this project, I am going to create a full printable tarot deck using illustrations made featuring the 22 different adoptable characters I've purchased over the years (and to be clear, I am not selling tarot-inspired adoptables). Unlike most tarot art projects, which only do the major arcana, I'm going to do the minor arcana as well.

I announced this project over on DeviantART about a month ago. I was unsure if I wanted to mirror the project over here until today. I will start posting the individual card illustrations one every Wednesday, and will post the images I already put on DA within this week, as it'll be easier for me to worry about uploading the same card every day. If you want to keep track of the project as a whole, keep an eye on this page.

So for the last several months to maybe even over a year ago, I've been purchasing adoptable characters from awesome artists from both here and DeviantART, mostly girls. But apparently there's a nuance I missed, namely that when you buy a character from an artist, that artist may expect you to... basically use them immediately. Admittedly, I've been buying many of these characters impulsively as they hit a combination of adorably huggable and not expensive. The first one I bought I had a purpose for, but that purpose was to be a character in a visual novel or novel novel, so not only would that not be showing up soon after purchase, I possibly wouldn't have ever ended up actually drawing her; and now it's likely she won't even show up in that.

And of course anyone that's followed me on DA for the last several years knows I don't draw very often anymore.

So I would like to inform the artists of all the characters I've spent like a hundred dollars altogether on that I do have a project I'm using them all for, but it is sizeable as heck and it's certainly not going to be showing up immediately. They are seeing use, just not where you can see them.

Thank you for your patience.

I never really do that whole thing on DA, but I guess that's why my DA gallery doesn't get more faves than it does. Time to play catch-up.

I mean, this place has never been a huge hub of activity for me, but maybe you follow me and you're curious.

Well there are a couple more Joseph stories in the works, but I'm also doing a Club fanfic based on  Arigah's work. It's slow-going as it's as subject to my fickle moods as anything else I do, and - amazingly for me actually - doesn't have a proper title yet, which is why it's three chapters of over 4K words each in and nothing's been posted yet. I've kept contact with the author to make sure I'm keeping everyone in-character, which is a big priority for me.

Once I get a title going, I can at least post the first chapter. Hopefully that'll be soon.

OK, hell with it, let's see what this sucker can do...

== Results from http://bdsmtest.org/ ==
79% Switch
74% Experimentalist
71% Submissive
66% Girl/Boy
63% Daddy/Mommy
63% Non-monogamist
61% Bondage Receiver
59% Bondage Giver
59% Brat
58% Degradation Giver
58% Degradation Receiver
53% Master/Mistress
50% Voyeur
49% Dominant
46% Brat Tamer
43% Vanilla
41% Masochist
36% Primal (Predator)
36% Slave
34% All-Rounder
33% Primal (Prey)
30% Exhibitionist
25% Sadist
13% Pervert
See my results online at http://bdsmtest.org/result.php?id=52865

Huh. #2 was a bit surprising, but #1 and #3 fit pretty well.

Honestly, the freakiest part of the whole thing is the graffiti text in the background...