Well, relatively okay, he's alive. He's out in the woods in an RV with his family. They are currently homeless. He has no phone reception and most definitely no internet, so he won't be online for a while.

Understandably he's having a really rough go of it, this is probably the worst place for him to be right now. Your regards and well-wishes would be immensely appreciated! I'll forward any messages I can.

Hey, just on the off chance...

I'm looking for a place to live in Toronto somewhere in the next couple of months and casting a line for roommates or openings in dwellings and such. I'm looking for about $600 on rent, less if possible, somewhere between Dufferin and Woodbine, south of St. Clair. I'm checking the usual sites, but I would ideally like to find some kindred spirits that are already down with the furry stuff. I hate the idea of moving in with total strangers. I tried it already and it didn't work out super well. If you would like to have a Swatcher as a roommate or know someone who'd dig that, I'd love to hear from you! Fire me a note or something.

Being a MANLY MAN is really fucking simple.

http://manteresting.com/shame/

I mean, you know when you're doing it wrong. These guys are letting you know you're doing it wrong by shaming. They're just letting you know! No harm in that. They're letting you know how you should behave, and you know, this sort of chummy competition is just what being a man is all about. You like competition, right? SPORTS! WAR! Men make fun of each other, it's just what they do. There are things that people do that they should be ashamed of, especially other men. Do you do those things? Maybe you should feel ASHAMED. If you're ashamed enough, maybe you'll see reason and adopt proper manly behaviours. Maybe you should make other men feel ashamed of not being as manly as you are. They're probably gay! Man, all these homos queering up the place. Pinterest has too many women talking about things other than having sex with me. Only QUEERS hang out with women without wanting to fuck them. FRIENDZONE. Chick shit like BATH MATS and BEAUTIFUL LANDSCAPES are not MANTERESTING enough. Pins? Pins are for BITCHES. We don't use no pins. We've got NAILS. We NAIL SHIT to OTHER SHIT with our ERECT PENISES. NO FAT CHICKS. You wear a cardigan? GAAAAAY. I bet you enjoy CALLIGRAPHY and COOKING. I bet you like the Chicago Bulls, because they're a GAY TEAM. You would wear a hat with FLOWERS ON IT because you're SO GAY. FISTBUMPS, BRO! NO HOMO.

Ahem.

For the men, does this "shame" thing feel familiar to any of you guys? Can you identify behaviours and interests that you have that you feel go against the norm? Do you feel ashamed about having these behaviours and interests, even though nobody has told you personally that you ought to be ashamed? Have you suffered consequences for failing to meet gender norms that you weren't aware of?

I'm curious about all of this because I've never found a better example of hegemonic masculinity than the Manteresting Wall of Shame. Let's call this into question: the traits of (violent) aggression and dominance of other men and especially of women is inherent to the male sex. It's purportedly just what guys do, but let's say it is a culturally constructed system called The Patriarchy which is continued generation after generation because of men who are afraid of losing their privileged position within society. Let's say they associate their dominant behaviour with their gender as a reason not to get called out on being kind of horrible human beings because "that's just the way guys are". The association of violent dominance and masculinity could not be illustrated any more clearly than the image of a fist facing downward (as though beating someone into submission) and it's funny that Manteresting uses that iconography for "shaming" an image. Oh no wait, it's not funny. It's horrifying. Remember that time a guy was beaten up for his presumed homosexuality? Wait, hold on, you mean which time this week, or...?

Instead maybe we guys should pay close attention to this kind of thing because it makes is very, very, very easy to manipulate into doing stupid shit. To women, especially, but also to other men. We ought to adopt a skeptical attitude toward our own (male/masculine) gender, considering that we have been born into a world where we are continuously being privileged, and ask ourselves if the good of 100% of the human population is being promulgated by preserving an essentialist view of gender, especially our own, within our respective communities.

At least drop this fucking violence/shame bullshit.

I've been temporarily let go from my job. It's a long story, there's a chain of events that needs to occur before they'll have the work for me again. I like my job, my co-workers and the location and I want to stay there for as long as possible. I'm on the verge of getting benefits. That's huge!

However, I'm not getting paid during this forced vacation. Yikes! This comes at an extremely bad time, when I'm in the middle of a move. I don't know how long I'll be functionally unemployed for (which is annoying) but in the meantime I'd like to take some commissions to make ends meet. I know it's AC time and all but I also know y'all want some Swatcher art, now's the time to get some!

My commission prices (which I've lowered) are here: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1902433/

I'm going to start a new queue, fresh start! Naturally, if you were in the old queue, I'll be glad to bump you up to the top of the list, it's only fair. The queue, for future reference, will be in this journal. Comment here to get added, and either describe your commission in the comments or in a note, whatever your preference! Just make sure you provide good references and let me know in detail what you're ordering so I know how much to bill. Considering the circumstances, if you wanna kick in a few extra bux as tip, I would much appreciate it.

1-  flir
2-  The-Man-Suicune
3-  Rabadash
4-  Rai_Cheeger
5-  grandstorm
6-  zyxxs

NEW: I can't take on any more commissions at the moment.

One proviso: due to the circumstances, once I get my job back I won't have the time to work on any more commissions. So being on the list isn't a total 100% guarantee that I'll get to you, but the earlier you hop in, the better your chances. Get 'em while they're hot, I guess!

I'll begin tomorrow, and I'll be streaming the commissions.

Thanks y'all! I hope this works out!

Follow me!

https://twitter.com/#!/satansmoustache

Yeah, may as well keep this ball rolling. I'm in a writey mood.

So I went to art school for my postsecondary education. In high school, most of my artistic output was drawing. I loved making comics. On the side, my whole life, I'd been doing little experimental videos. Just little special effects things, jump cuts and in-camera editing and fucking around with transfer speeds and doing animations and time lapses and stuff. I've been taking things apart, too, fucking around inside. Hardware, software, whatever. You know, classic hacker shit. I wasn't as good at it as most other people, but hey, you don't need to be to get what being a hacker is about.

So imagine my surprise when I got a chance to go to school and major in Fucking Around With Shit. They call it New Media... or they called it that, I don't know what they call it now, but it's essentially experimental art where time is a major component. That includes a lot of interactive art, film/video art, and performance. I... love that style of art, it takes basically everything that surrounds us and comes at it from a really meta direction. It changed the way I thought about making art, and that includes furry art!

But like, meanwhile, as you can tell, I've been drawing a lot of furry art! I fucking love this subculture, but it's so inherently Internet and weird and punk that bringing it into the Institution of High Art is kind of a joke. It's hard enough to get people to take furries seriously in their native habitat. I've tried writing about furries and contemporary art before and like... there's kind of nowhere to step. Internet subcultures in general are seen as the domain of cultural studies, and the writing about them has a detached, vaguely ethnographical bent to it.

Donna Haraway comes close to nailing the ethos of the subculture in the Cyborg Manifesto, but perhaps it only explains why it's so easy to be a furry feminist--maybe I can export the metaphor. We're all hybrids here, not just hybrids between humans and animals but hybrids of human and machine (our social context is very very very very mediated by technology, all the websites and forums we use, and occasionally our costumes) and hybrids of real and fictional. My name isn't actually Swatcher, I'm not a cartoon, but I also am! Plus, the basic fictional-ness of anthropomorphic animals makes it impossible NOT to play with the fluidity of our own identities, and by escaping from our human bodies we're unintentionally but harshly critiquing the structures of meaning we place on the body. We identify as animals because, maybe, the way we're forced to think about our own human bodies is kind of horrific.

However, it's impossible to ignore the fact that the fandom isn't a totally postmodern space, despite it being one in theory. Our actual identities bleed in through the conventions and our voices over Skype and the profile photos we post, and our identities implicate us in the systems that govern identities. I don't think any of us are totally living the dream of transcending humanity, which is what we're doing if we're up to the whole roleplaying-as-an-animal element of the fandom. Still though, the half-fictional, half-real, gender-bending and race-destroying post-scarcity imaginary world of furry makes way more sense than the essentialism of a lot of art discourse and cultural theory. When I look at the fandom, I think, hey... there's a nugget of Truth in all of this. This is actually kind of postmodern and it's actually kind of going in the right direction, that's super cool! Who the fuck knew it would appear here, right?

Now while I love drawing furry art and posting it to FA, since it's pretty fun and it gets me off and I'm going to keep doing it, there's just... that nugget, I can't let it go. I see the way we operate here and it's kind of great. On the flipside, as an Internet Subculture With a Bad Reputation, we're cloistered. Not just by our own persecution complex or by the media or anything else, but by a system where both we on the inside and the "mundanes" on the outside agree that we're a thing apart, the same system that is happy to categorize furry art as illustration or, maybe generously, outsider art. The art that gets into galleries is not the art that we post to FA, and there's a system in place to explain why that is. There's a nugget and I want to get it out and give it to people and say HEY, this is kind of working better than what we've got going on. That nugget is the way we act out and build and illustrate all of this imaginary stuff in order to explore different ways of doing things. That nugget is the fact that we're pressured to retreat from society in order to do this shit in private, like it's hurting anyone. That nugget is... not entirely clear to me yet. But I want to find out!

So yeah, tl;dr... I think there's something to the way we do things and think about things in the fandom that would be useful outside the fandom and I want to make art about that for people who aren't in the fandom.

So like, what's the deal? The majority opinion seems to be that these are not as great as the fake-eye variety. I mean, it's just not the style people like, you rarely see it in the fandom. The potential for treading into TERRORSVILLE is also pretty high. But I've seen some great heads that make use of the wearer's eyes in a way I much prefer to the glassy cross-eyed stares of the more mascotty style. It's the style of head I build, when I work on my own half-cocked fursuit projects, and because I obsess over this kind of thing I want to really understand the forces at work behind the TERRORSVILLE reaction so I can figure out whether I should actually take peoples' advice or whether I should roll my eyes and move on.

So okay, the uncanny valley thing. Mostly an excuse for stylistic xenophobia! And by that, saying "it's the uncanny valley" is just an easy way out of an ambivalent reaction that hasn't had the chance to solidify yet. The uncanny valley has a cool name and a CHART and it was invented by a SCIENTIST, holy crap. As a design rubric meant for robots, the uncanny valley is meant to be avoided. Applied more generally, people superficially familiar with the concept use it to say that because something has that uncanny quality, it's bad, and ought to be rejected in the way that nerds reject anything that has slight flaws. The concept of the "uncanny" is paradoxical, though! It blends the familiar with the strange. You see it, you recognize something in it that draws you in, but it's different in such a way that your regular reactions don't seem to match up with the situation. You wonder what you should do next. The uncanny valley isn't a state of fear, it's a state of ambivalence; you're left teetering on the edge of making a decision. The reason I say it's stylistic xenophobia is that the uncanny valley theory gives people the authority to say: "This is strange, I don't know how to feel about it, therefore it's bad." It's easy to have this reaction because you see it over and over again, you lose nothing by parroting.

People don't see eyes-visible suits that often, they don't look like mascots, and so there are no established social conventions for dealing with that. So... let's unpack that a bit! What does it mean to say that there are social conventions for mascot performers? You have sporting events, theme parks, promotional gigs. A mascot is the centre of attention and draws people in, gets them excited. You see the same sorts of behaviour in fursuiters: high energy, bright colors, entertaining.

But just by having your eyes visible, you don't look like a mascot performer. You look like... something else. What happens when you make eye contact? What do you do? Everything changes the moment a pair of real human eyes strikes yours. You're involved! It's personal! A switch in the human brain gets flipped and the neurons that deal with peer-to-peer social interactions lights up. You do the threat assessment. People can't help it, it's the way we're programmed, we compare other humans to what we've been exposed to. We either allow our prejudices to take hold or we fight to overcome them. Ambivalently, we flip wildly between curiosity and fear until we settle on one or the other. The reward for success is that you get to hijack that strong neural pathway and create a really powerful and memorable character. The punishment for failure is that everyone is terrified and nobody wants to go near you, which is not what you want as a performer!

The trick is... well, I don't know the trick to making this style of costume work. It's hard work overcoming that curiosity/fear response... Offer people something they like, maybe, in exchange for the stylistic deviation. Distract them with some other part of the costume so the intensity isn't dialled up super high all the time. I have no clue! I know, though, that I wouldn't be interested in making it work if it didn't provoke such an ambivalent reaction in people. What I struggle with dodging the negative reaction, and I suppose that's as much my struggle as an artist as much as it is everyone else's challenge to get outside their comfort zone.

AWFUL, AWFUL TWO WEEKS.

So my computer broke down, first of all. I needed a new graphics card. I need a new hard drive too if I ever want to use Mac OS and all of my creativity programs again, but hey, at least I have a functioning computer.

Then my roommate and I had... well, let's just make a long story short and say we had different attitudes toward life, and now I'm in the process of moving back out again. I'm looking for a bachelor apartment. Living alone. No roommates. Yeah.

To top it all off, my job was hemming and hawing about hiring me full time, and I was constantly afraid of not working for two weeks, which would have made money extremely tight.

I had nowhere safe to come home to, no computer world to escape into, no sense of financial security... The stress all built up and I had a major breakdown. Probably the worst anxiety I've had in my entire life, with attacks so severe I thought I had the flu.

I went to see my GP and now I have a bottle of clonazepam at the ready in case I have another breakdown. Anxiety is a mental illness which manifests itself in rather alarming physical sensations. Constant muscle tension, headaches, shaking, nausea, and a general feeling of being about to die. If you've ever had a fight-or-flight moment, imagine that lasting for hours and hours, and not being able to do anything about it. I tried just about everything. I tried blaming other people. I tried blaming myself. It was all totally irrational and none of it seemed to prevent these incapacitating physical manifestations.

Just about the only thing that helped was having the patience of my friends, family and the oh so patient  rubberskunktoo with whom I traded almost daily e-mails over the phone. If you'll permit a message directly to him... I LOVE YOU! I'm always going to remember how I felt when we would talk, briefly, on Skype. You're a king among men, and I owe you a million smooches. <3

I'm going to start going to group cognitive behavioral therapy sessions (which are thankfully free!) to figure out what to do next time things start to get bad.

That's where I've been lately. It was a hard hit to the system, but some of you I'm sure have been through much worse. Things are getting better, and I hope to return to being a murry furry pretty soon. :)

Don't get me wrong, I really like my job! However, it leaves me a LOT of time with my thoughts. Sometimes, those thoughts turn dark, and I get into anxiety loops that I can't get out of. That's just generally part of the overall package that is an anxiety disorder.

However, it helps a lot to have something more enjoyable to focus on, not just at work but in life. I have some things already but they barely fill the loooong-seeming day, and so I'm soliciting suggestions for scenarios to fantasize about! Especially TF scenarios where the aftermath is pleasant and anxiety-free. I know this is a weird request since these things are probably not going to be drawn, but it would help a lot to keep my mind clear.

I had a really interesting exchange with  mx_scade in my previous journal, and it's got me thinking—never a good thing, natch—about why I'm on FA and why I'm interested in transformation and costumes and why I react the way I do to criticism and all sorts of junk. I really try to resist the temptation to talk about myself in my journal and keep the topic kinda participatey for the comments, but in this case I do want to take some time to introspect, because I think in a lot of ways we're all in the same boat, we can learn from one-another.

Up until maybe college, I've had to live with the repercussions of being kind of a spaz when I was a kid. I was, and still am, what they refer to as a "high reactive". I react with almost violent emotion to new situations, which makes me a very anxious person almost all of the time. Making a good first impression with strangers kills me. As a kid, they said I was "sensitive", but the less polite way to say it would be that I was a crybaby. I might have ADD, I dunno, I've never been diagnosed officially, but the fact of the matter is that I get absurdly discombobulated by novelty, for better or for worse.

Luckily though, I have a saving grace. I react to fear by becoming obssessively fascinated by the things that scare me, because knowledge helps me to overcome the loud, booming voice of my amygdala. And gosh, there's nothing like understanding for overcoming fear! It's a lesson hard learned, to be sure, but every single one of my childhood fears were destroyed by yours truly in a committed campaign of research. I was afraid of bats, so I made a documentary movie about bats for school. Tornadoes too. But when it came to the everyday forms of social anxiety, there was no such outlet. I already had this reputation of being wildly emotional and histrionic and taking stuff way too personally, and testing my social limits just made me seem like even more of an alien. It was like I was being shadowed by this weirdo past version of me that was just committed to sabotaging every social interaction I had. My classmates were convinced I had no friends because I had no interest in befriending anyone I'd have to be stuck with for 5-6 hours every weekday. My friends were all outside of school, or else they were from other grades and we'd hang out on the playground. On the playground there wasn't this sense of being trapped with my reputation.

I really hated my rep and so it was no wonder that I mostly stuck to playing games where I could pretend to be someone else, something else, upon which nobody could place any sort of expectation of what constituted normal reactions or behaviour. I thought that if it were only possible to literally turn into something not human, I would be set. There would be no more expectations that I act like all of these other human beings who seemed perfectly capable of controlling their reactions to stimuli. I didn't think of myself as a bad person, I was reacting to stuff in the only way I knew how, and yet everyone around me went out of their way to let me know how much of a freak I was. I got bullied a ton. I once confessed to a girl in elementary school that I had a crush on her, and she literally screamed and ran away. It only helped to fuel my self-hatred.

So I started fantasizing a LOT about these sorts of scenarios. In highschool, one of my closest friends confessed to me that he was a werewolf. You know, a "therian". After some initial half-hearted skepticism, he convinced me that he was awakening to the power to physically transform himself into a wolf. The reason his arguments were so compelling was mostly because I wanted to believe him so bad. It hit so close to home. I thought that if he was successful, it would prove that transformation was possible. Naturally, he was never successful, although we did succeed in some pretty heavy self-hypnosis.

I had never been much interested in sex, though I knew it existed from a very young age. Maybe too young, in fact. My parents, being progressive, gave us all of the gory details the moment that we were curious. It wasn't enough to say that babies come out of mommies when mommies and daddies love each other. Nope, I apparently learned about erections and everything. It wasn't gross, in fact it was presented in such a clinical, matter-of-fact way that I was eager to rope my sister in, to the horror of both of my parents, who were all to happy to tell me about the birth defects that could result from incest, let alone the social awkwardness. So I tried to get a non-relative neighborhood girl to try the sex thing (I was maybe, uh, six or so) and uh I'll spare you the details but pre-pubescent sex is basically a non-starter for a variety of reasons. I only mention it because I think it initially cemented this idea of vanilla sexuality as a vaguely unpleasant phenomenon and therefore it was Not For Me. Going to a Catholic school, I thought nothing of the sexually repressive environment. I was a great kid when it came to Catholicism! I didn't really have sexually unclean thoughts, I didn't lust after any girls... super chastity! Unfortunately, it seems like that's the recipe for developing a fetish.

Normal people, I suppose, fantasized about sex a whole bunch. You know, you have this strange, hormonal attraction to other people all of a sudden, and you're curious. You play doctor, you find your first porn, that kind of thing. I wasn't fantasizing about sex, I had pretty much given up on the idea that any girl would like me, and being a homo faggot queer in a Catholic high school would pretty much mean that my life was over, and when the fantasies about transformation suddenly started turning me on I didn't even notice. I thought, honestly, that during puberty you got boners for no reason whatsoever all the time. I didn't ever associate the fact that I was getting boners whenever my thoughts drifted to changing.

When  astolpho came out as a babyfur it was the kick in the pants that I needed. It finally clicked, no more hemming and hawing and denial. I would think about transformation, and I would get a boner. It was thoroughly consistent. I had a transformation fetish. Not just a kink, but a full blown paraphilia for turning into things, no arousal response at all to the thought of rubbing my vile mucousy bits against anyone. And, you know, I didn't want to have this happen! I was so mean to pervs before I came out to myself. I was in denial. It's not easy at all to be a sexual deviant. You never get acknowledged by society ever except in the context of being kind of a freakshow. I love what I am, even though I'm weird! Nevertheless, I would rather not have to put up with constant mockery just so that I can be myself.

All I want is to be accepted for who I am despite the fact that yeah, I AM a bit of a freakshow. I gravitate toward freaky stuff because that's the way I feel about myself, but the outcome I look for isn't to have my freakiness acknowledged. Fuck, I kind of hate having my worst fears confirmed. I want to be liked, just like everyone else, and I want people to get over their preconceived notions and see past all of my strange behavior and see that I'm a pretty okay guy! I love my friends, I love talking about intellectual shit, and I'd like to think I have a talent for endless sympathy, even though I can get pretty self-centered. In my fantasy world, sure I can get turned into, I dunno, a scary clown or something equally traumatic, but under that skin I'm still me, and the people who can overcome that fear are the people I know I can trust. People who won't make fun of me, who'll see past the transformation.

When I was younger, I was really affected by Disney's Beauty and the Beast, when Belle looks into the Beast's eyes and recognizes his former humanity. Sure, it's totally corny, but I think it underscores why I do the things I do.

As a postscript, I should mention that being on FA has helped me a great deal, and it's not just because I'm just posting shit. All of my friends have been so supportive and helpful and sympathetic and you mean a lot. I never thought I'd even be in a relationship but I have a deeply caring man with whom I share a great deal of love. It's progress, and I can say that all of this social anxiety shit is increasingly in the past and I'm becoming a more confident person as I sort this stuff through. So <3

I love comments, doesn't everyone? I mean, a few frustrations aside, getting a comment always brightens my day. I want to return the favor and comment more, but there's that thing that people do where they just comment with "Great pic!" 'cause they think they ought to leave a comment if they're going to fav something. I've done that too, it's not criminal or nothing, but it could be better!

So what's the point on commenting on someone else's drawing? After all, there may be nothing to add to the discussion. You just like something, intuitively. A picture vibes in tune with you, and you recognize something familiar in it. You may want to share that feeling with the artist, to see if you're on their wavelength.

What's the point of interacting at all?

I feel so lucky. <3

Hey everyone! Long time no chat!

I haven't been drawing much lately, and I'm not sure when I'll be able to sit down and get into a drawin' mindset. For a variety of reasons, thusly:

I got a job, it's a 9-to-5er (on contract). I'm in manufacturing. That's all I can say about that. *mystery*

I'm also moving, same city, different neighborhood. I'll have a roommate. It will be AWESOME, I really lucked out and got a great deal on a superb location.

I also have a ton of art projects that aren't furry-related that are consuming much of my free time. Howeverrrrr there are a few costume projects I've been engaged in that you will see photos of emerging from time to time, as you've probably noticed! I friggin' love this shit. I can't wait to finish my first suit! I will totally want to make more after that.

Anyway, I'm on FA, I'm still faving and commenting and reading everyone's shouts and browsing through submissions, but I probably won't be uploading all that much. It sucks, I wish I could be drawing. I wish I could be back up on FA, getting comments like THIS REMINDS ME OF DOCTOR ZEUS or HEY SWATCHER HAVE YOU SEEN THIS YOUTUBE IT'S CALLED TOON WOLF IT'S LIKE TEEN WOLF BUT WITH A CARTOON I THINK YOU'D LIKE IT.

To the people I still owe commissions, that's my situation. If you're not into that, I can remove you from the queue. In fact, I highly suggest opting for this, I don't know when I'm going to get around to completing everyone's shit. I apologize for flaking out like this, it was more out of desperation for income than anything else.

My ad rotation is ending tomorrow. Coincidentally, I just got a job that will keep me away from the computer a whole bunch! The current slots will stay where they are, but I'll probably be closing for business for an indeterminate amount of time. Since this weekend is FC, I'll leave things up for another week (Midnight Eastern Time, January 20th, for those who want specifics). Then I'll complete the queue as time permits. I'll do a postmortem on the ad, for those of you who are curious to know how it went!

At any rate, if you want to get a Swatcher commission, your time is limited! Fill out my Commission Form (prices are here) and I'll add your icon to my artist info in the order that the requests come in.

I may reopen later, but don't count on in!

Hey! If you've shown up here via my banner ad, welcome! I hope everyone is having a merry holiday full of cheer. If you aren't, well don't worry, it will soon be over!

You realize that I have 2500 watchers now? That's incredible! I hope you all enjoy weird transformationy things, because there will be a lot of it.

Yes, I'm doing away with the whole open/closed slots thing! At least somewhat. If my queue gets too unwieldy I may change my mind. All this means is that I'm ALWAYS open for commissions. In addition, I've made a few changes to the way I handle commissions.

First, the active queue has been moved to my artist info on my userpage, which I think ought to convey the same information in a more concise manner! If there's a long queue you probably won't be getting your commission in a super timely manner and such. You'll also know when your request is about to be posted, if you care to know such things. :)

Second, my commission info journal is now much more concise. Just the facts, all you need to know about rules and prices. Nothing confusing that you might be tempted to skip over.

Third, I'm now taking commission requests only via form submission, rather than via note or through comments. I'm tired of having an inbox that's cluttered and long strings of RE: RE: RE: RE: RE:.

So I'm taking commissions, if you want to get one! Commission me!

It's easy to get discouraged as an artist in an environment with a lot of numerical indicators of the attention you're getting. One of the reasons I make art at all is to be able to express a sentiment I can't put into words, to offer something up to everyone else with the question "what is this?". So when I feel like I'm getting shafted, attention-wise, when something I'm proud to call original and fresh gets way less attention than a piece of vapid fanart tissue paper quality porn, I simply remind myself of a little thing called normal distribution. It's also called the "bell curve", if the other name doesn't ring any bells, oh ho ho.

Since popularity is in question, let's pretend, for example, that there exists somewhere a ranking of all FA users that boasts a sort of numerical value of popularity. We can present this data as a bar graph, in which we'll see a peak at the most popular users with diminishing returns we get to the least popular users. Let's also pretend that the most popular furry is Zaush. Basically, from Zaush on down, you have every other artist on the site. You, me, everyone. Are you a better or a worse artist than Zaush, for any reason? You're probably in the half of FA users who are better or the half of FA users who are worse. Yeah, I propose that the most popular artists on FA are the ones who are the most middling at everything they do.

See, I haven't done the math or anything, but I'll bet you that the most popular furry artist, in this totally hypothetical scenario, happens to be the peak in the gaussian distribution curve of random tastes and preferences that furries have. Although I'm sure the actual numbers shake out in a specific manner that I'm sure would be very enlightening, it's fair to think of the most popular artists being the 50% line, and you're either better than them or you're worse than them depending on a variety of metrics... composition, characterization, proper anatomy, clean linework, other things art viewers find pleasant. Democracy tends to lead away from extremes (thankfully, in most cases), but an essential component of any artmaking community is a group that's pushing the boundaries and expanding definitions and experimenting with those extremes—not always intentionally. Most people aren't going to be furry art connoisseurs who have 'seen everything' and have narrowed down their artistic preferences, and when every +watch a person gets is by a different account started by a different person, it's safe to assume that the reason that person got popular is simply because they got the largest amount of checkmarks on everyone's list of things they don't find unacceptable.

So you should care about who's the most popular, if you're feeling discouraged. If you count on popular taste aiming for the middle, you can rest assured that you're doing SOMETHING right if you think you're at least as good an artist as Zaush—or whoever is the most popular furry artist. Otherwise, you know exactly how much you need to improve to be able to do the same.

MASSIVE EDIT: to add a bunch more stuff...

Have you ever noticed how those democratic reality TV shows like American Idol tend to churn out almost exactly the same singer every season? It makes sense that the tastes of a TV show's audience would average out to some set of mutually un-disagreeable qualities, resulting in something somewhat bland by virtue of natural selection.

I wouldn't blame you if you weren't familiar with Komar and Melamid, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were... they made a series of paintings based on the results of a survey of peoples aesthetic tastes in painting. I think their biggest hit is when they did this with music, producing the Most Unwanted Song (link makes sound!) and The Most Wanted Song (link doesn't make sound!). Does The Most Wanted Song sound familiar? Yeah, it's every pop ballad ever.

I guess this is also how memes happen, and why people who care about humor find them so fucking annoying.

It's been over a year since I decided to give up pork. Since then, I've been careful about what animals I eat. People seem kinda weird about my reluctance to eat pigs, even after I explain that I've learned too much about porcine intelligence to want to eat them as cavalierly as a bacon-obsessed culture seems to want me to. People usually ask me if I'm Jewish, because that's the only reason someone wouldn't eat pigs, right? Anyway, the pork thing is an ongoing project of working out an evidence-based diet, and that involves determining exactly what qualities make for an inedible animal. Ultimately it's really difficult to draw the line between "this animal is fit for consumption" and "the idea of killing this animal for food makes me queasy" without being sentimental.

Despite the danger of anthropomorphizing animal intelligence, most animals and people have a LOT in common. Rats, for instance, have a supersonic laugh, and will laugh when tickled. Animals feel pain, have emotions, have complex relationships with our peers, can recognize individuals and can predict their behavior to a certain extent in a way that's frighteningly congruous with humans. In order to kill another animal in order to consume it, the person doing the deed needs to decide if the suffering involved in transmuting life into consumption products is worth it. Because... sometimes it is, nature is cruel, animals eat each other. But with our ability to understand the underlying structures of things, shouldn't we be re-evaluating our relationship with the animal kingdom?

Again, I have no idea where to draw that line. I try to base my decisions on evidence, but there's not a whole lot of accessible evidence out there. There's a lot of PETA, there are a lot of people whose primary purpose for writing is to burst vegetarians' bubbles, but not a whole lot of intelligent discussion around food animal consumption, compared to the general argument which seems to be "eating animals is wrong~!" vs. "fine then for every animal you don't eat I'm going to eat THREEEEEEEE lol maddox" and none of it is based on evidence. It's inevitably based on how adorable and sad and sick an animal looks in a cage. Many people refuse to eat veal due to the way it's raised, but they'll turn a blind eye to the thousands upon thousands of sows, as smart as dogs, kept in even more atrocious conditions, unable to lie down, just so that they can continue to enjoy their bacon houses.

There are plenty of things I want to know about, though. What selective pressures do farms put on these animals, and what COULD farms do to "edit" animals into a more consumable product? If you breed a pig to be insensate, would it be ethical to eat it if it has had no experience of the outside world? If you engineered it to produce less polluting waste? We're still arguing over GMOs, so people would probably not be cool with that. What's the best way to proceed with GMOs? Are people ready to figure in non-human intelligence as a deciding point in their treatment of animals?

Ten new slots! I may be so bold as to suggest that people get a morph commission, I love doing them a whole bunch.

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1902433/

CLICK THE LINK ABOVE for the commission permajournal, which has all of the information you need to get a commission from me. Thanks!

How many of you want to be this robot:



The whirly flashy police light where the head is supposed to be? Top notch.

Hey all. I fractured my shoulder two weeks ago, and had an operation to fix my humerus on Thursday, which is why I've been mostly absent from FA. I haven't been able to draw or type much (I'm typing this all with one hand... exhausting!) which puts me squarely in nowheresville, as far as being a web presence is concerned. The worst is over now, I'm on the mend, but I still don't know when I'll be able to draw again. I hope to at least be well enough before Halloween. Anyway, it seems like life is keeping me from completing some of my FA specific projects. I'll go over 'em.

Commissions:

I apologize for the slowness completing these. I have a variety of excuses but they're all pretty dumb... I did get a pretty cool gig that I can't say much about. Besides that, I had a few personal pics to get out of the way. I'd been away all summer without a chance to draw for myself, natch! But enough of that, I'm going to push through my queue as soon as my arm heals enough to use keyboard shortcuts without getting a horrid cramp. Since it's been a long time coming, I'll confirm the current queue with each of you as I get to you. I really apologize for flaking!

TF Podcasts:

I need some time to re-organize who wants to participate in what topic. I think we're good to go on a couple topics, though! I can do these without the use of my arm, so expect a note from me very soon.

Because of the popularity of The mind and TF and TF as a Fetish as topics, I needed to do some selection. I don't really know a lot of you so I have no idea why you're into discussing one topic over another, so I'm prioritizing people who have a clear interest in the subject they chose to talk about. TF artists also get priority, so if there ain't a bunch of TF art in your gallery you might not get picked, but that's only the case for the two topics I mentioned! I've been shuffling names around a bunch and I believe I have a good roster.

I've also updated the podcast journal in the link above with the latest numbers and topics, as well as edited for clarity. Go check it out!

Personal projects

I wanna work on some of my own art projects, since I've only been able to draw for myself maybe, uh, four times since the start of July, and even then they've just been sketchy experiments. I'll probably alternate my commissions with some Swatcher originals as time goes on. I have some ambitious ideas. ^^

Anyway that's it. Let's get this shit awn.

On account of I'm a skunk!

Fuck me, though, silicone masks are way too expensive for my income to justify. Seems like if you make that investment you'd better be getting a damn good return on it entertainment-wise. That's the tough thing with buying costumes. It's only worth building a costume if you have a place where it would be appropriate to show it off.

Hey everyone! It's the first podcast thing! This one is about costumes and transformation. It's about an hour and ten minutes long, and that's down from nearly 90 minutes, but it's a fascinating hour if I do say so myself!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7012280/Cos.....20and%20TF.mp3

Big ups to the panel this time, they really brought their A-game:

 howler  turbinedivinity  matrixcodex  duskysam  rusheloc

The next instalment will appear whenever I can get enough people to sign up! No qualifications are necessary, only that you be interested in the topic! You can find out more about this project by following the link in the header of my journal.

Enjoy! ^^

First of all, if you're not well acquainted with the transformation art and writing community, you might not be familiar with how much people fret about the existence of fetish porn in their transformation drawings. It's a, uh, interesting social dynamic. At any rate, the bickering is boring, I find it rather unpleasant. In fact, the whole argument is rather silly. As adults, we should talk about mature subject matter in a mature manner! The TF community, such as it is, is very well insulated and very well connected—we're small enough to talk about gaining a new perspective on what the presence of porn means to our collective fandom, we don't need to keep playing the same game.

Before we throw definitions out the window, let's go over them. For the most part, when people say that a transformation picture is pornographic, it's because it has visible genitals. This is pretty arbitrary, since a lot of the triggery stuff that arouses transformation fetishists isn't sexually explicit in the slightest to begin with.

So a few people cast a broader net; they say that transformation porn is an image or story stripped of narrative, heavy on the evocative description, light on context and characterization. In the same way that a show with a title like America's Deadliest Car Crashes might be referred to as "disaster porn", a transformation sequence showing an anonymous (or barely nonymous) clothed woman turning into a dog in white void world would constitute transformation porn.

To go even further and say that all TF art is porn in a sense is, natch, a controversial opinion that's sure to garner argument almost anywhere you express it. To my mind, getting upset when people are turned on by your excerpted TF clips on YouTube makes about as much sense as being chastely enthusiastic about a wet T-shirt contest. Nevertheless there's such a sharp line drawn between porn and non-porn that artists will frequently upload two versions of the same picture, one with visible genitals, the other without. It's as though these two nearly identical images were meant for different purposes! Gerrymandering the meaning of words so that they can dictate which art is meant to be viewed by some imaginary public and which art is meant to be censored is a popular fandom activity, but nobody outside the ingroup gives a shit about anyone's stupid dictionary definitions.

So you can forget the aforementioned, it don't matter.

The main thing I want to point out to the ingroup is that applying the word "porn", no matter how a particular person defines it, isn't a neutral activity. The word "porn" disempowers the thing it's applied to, and it's used to empower anything that isn't porn. There's an implied power dynamic between (let's use the words) "clean" artwork and "pornographic" artwork, where clean art is said to be clearly superior or preferable to the porn. Universally, clean art is capable of speaking to something like "higher values", and the minute you draw a drippy snatch then all of that high art is out the window. It's a brain vs. libido battle royale. Don't question any of that, by the way. Everyone knows you can only use one or the other and never both at once! Anyway, despite this crucial but totally imaginary dichotomy, nobody seems to be able to clearly draw the line between "clean" and "pornographic" without the argument devolving into quibbling over semantics—I think I've already mentioned—I'm not interested in doing that. The reason that people have different definitions for the word porn is because they want to say, "This porn is worthless and not good, don't pay attention to it. This Art, the Art I'm making, it's so good. Stop paying attention to them and pay attention to meeeeee!"

What we need to deal with as a community is not a divide between the clean art and the porn. What we need to deal with is the fact that no matter how pretentious we get with the tacked on backstory, all of TF art is created from an indulgent perspective. The transformation is almost never a metaphor—if it were, Franz Kafka would be an idol. If it's symbolic in any way, the meaning is secondary to the fact that literally growing something or someone else's body out of our own flesh would feel fucking neat and cool as all hell. We need to grow a pair (of perky horse ears) and just accept the fact that whether or not a thing is porn has no bearing on whether or not it's good.