Days staying:
Friday night to Sunday night, at least; hopefully, Thursday to Monday, work permitting.

Staying at:
There are a couple of nice belfreys at Market and West San Fernando.

How are you traveling?
I'm just going to ... wing it.

Who are you rooming with?
All your bats are belong to us.

Who will you be with?
I may show up at the various fat fur events.

Where will you be? How is the best way to find you?
I will be lurking, probably incognito!

What do you look like?
My hair color isn't too far from my fur color.

What is your gender?
Male!

Are you in a relationship?
Kiiiiiiinda!

Can I talk to you?
If you can find me!

Can I hug and/or snuggle you?
Not without permission!

Are you nice?
I may be a little too smug to qualify.

Are you cliquey?
I am so cliquey that you may not know you've seen me!
I've mantained a secret identity for years. Maybe this will be the year I let it go!

Are you fursuiting?
Nothing more elaborate than a kigurumi.

Which suit(s) will you be bringing?
See above!

If I see you, how should I get your attention?
Pastries and gourmet delicacies often work.
I have a particular fondness for the Strawberry Margarita Donut that they sell at the Psycho Donuts stand.

Dealers den?
Only as a customer.

Are you attending any panels?
There's no bat panel this year! ;/\;

Can I buy you drinks?
If you can find me!

Do you attend parties?
See "Cliquey", above. I prefer smaller groups, but that doesn't mean I'm averse to hanging out with new people.

Can I take your picture?
HISSSSS get your soul-stealing demon box away from meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

What's your goal(s) for the con this year?
SUSHI

I have been horrifically remiss, my friends and loyal readers: I know I've been procrastinating on uploading commissioned and gift art, but ... I have a backlog of fourteen images that I need to post!

To my surprise, I actually managed to upload all of them in under three hours -- plus a Second Life screenshot added to Scraps!

I apologize profusely to both my audience and all you wonderful artists who have done me the courtesy of lending their pen to my portly persona. I have done you all a disservice by my sloth.

Sloth is not my chosen vice! That's gluttony!

... with a side of lust, perhaps ...

The responses are already coming in, and ... goodness. Thank you, everyone, for all the watches and favorites and comments!

And now, back to writing!

 darkwulf and I are hard at work on Chapter 9, and are really going to push to get it ready for release before the one-year mark of Chapter 8's completion. This story is pretty well written in our heads: chapter 9 is almost done, and chapters 10, 11 and 12 are exhaustively outlined.

It has been observed that the text in general, and the portions from Velachko's point of view in particular, have a propensity for alliteration, repetition, and even the occasional dalliances with rhyme and meter, sometimes to the point of redundancy.

I plead guilty to this charge; I write my passages with a deliberately faux-archaic tone, and often edit Wuff's passages to conform. Yes, Stoker and Shelley and translated Dante and Voltaire were among my early influences, but moreso the deliberate floridity of Lovecraft, Leiber, and Moorcock. My Tolkien is more the whimsical rhymer of The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham than the staid historian of The Lord of the Rings.

I plead guilty, yes, but offer this in my defense: of course Velachko's tale is told in tones of rhythm and repetition.

He's a Bat, after all.

He thinks in echoes.

Huzzah! I'm leaving in a few minutes to fly out to Chicago, for Midwest Furfest!

I still haven't decided if I'm going to go incognito or not. I have such nice badges to wear ...

Chapter 8 can be found here!

As promised, I have assembled all the various parts of Chapter 8 into a single file, and posted it as one consistently-formatted whole.

The various subchapters are now in my Scraps folder. I apologize if anyone has any trouble accessing them. I've noticed that GoogleDocs creates poorly-formatted PDFs that not all PDF readers can recognize or open.

Like that one from Adobe.

I used LibreOffice for the combined document, so it shouldn't be an issue.

 darkwulf is pondering just posting the PDF version, instead of converting it to a TXT file. My propensity for italics and other formatting makes conversion a daunting prospect. If there's a demand for TXT, though, we can arrange it.

And now ... onto Chapter 9!

Another Excerpt from Lord Valachko's Journal!

8.05 will be the final segment of Chapter 8, and it's coming along well. I should be done with it in the next week or two, and then I will combine all of the segments into a single, official chapter, put the sub-chapters into Scraps, and release the whole shebang.

... And then  darkwulf gets to wake up and finish Chapter 9, and then maybe we can keep this thing on track until the Grand Finale!

... yes, I have been EXCEEDINGLY remiss in my writing duties, but no, more than that.

I have several commissions that have been lurking on my drive for varying lengths of time, and I've yet to upload them. It is very late this e'en, however ... but on the morrow, expect bat art!

Edit:

And the morrow it is!

I've uploaded eight new images to my gallery -- which you've all probably seen, because seriously, who reads journals first around here?

There's a six-part weight gain sequence by  damnedndelirious, starting here;

A delightful portrait by  sharpt00th;

And a sophisticated, urbane portrayal by  ribnose, which is now my new profile image.

More actual story is on the way. I promise!

I suspect that some of you might have noticed a few delays in the release schedule of His Official Capacity. I felt like I owed my readers some explanation, and I thought, in the process, I'd give you some insight into our creative process.

Back in the '60s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby pioneered what's known as the "Marvel Method" of making comic books. Stan and Jack would brainstorm the plot of an issue, Jack would draw the whole darned thing, and then Stan would sit down and add dialogue based on the original outline, the new elements that Jack incorporated into the art, and any random last-minute inspirations he might have had himself. While the Marvel Method isn't without its flaws (as the continuous, contentious controversy over creative credit for those seminal issues betrays), it does make for a very close collaboration, and I believe most Marvel writer/artist teams operated this way until the early 1990s, at least.

That's not too far from the way we produce HOC.

The original source material was a series of online RP logs between myself and  sheema (who was originally our "silent partner" until  darkwulf dropped a broad hint about her secret identity). darkwulf took those logs, and started expanding the narrative into a full-blown story. I volunteered to add the journals that introduce some chapters, and to do a series of editing passes, fine-tuning dialogue, cleaning up punctuation, and occasionally rephrasing entire passages.

When we ran out of logs, Wuff and I started brainstorming directly, with occasional input from sheema. Otherwise, the process was much the same: collaborative brainstorming, darkwulf writing the bulk of the text, and then Yours Truly sweeping through, cleaning up the grammar, nudging the dialogue, and adding the plethora of purple prose that seems so popular.

In other words, like Jolly Jack before him, darkwulf does most of the hard work.

The keen-eyed amongst you might note that some of the previous gaps in our schedule have been with the chapters that start with an excerpt from Lord Velachko's private journal. That's right: I write those, and while I'm adept at polishing an existing body of text to a mirror sheen, it's a bit more of a struggle for me to weave words from whole cloth, even when I have an outline in front of me.

Chapter 8 consists entirely of Lord Velachko's diary entries. And in a brilliant move, I volunteered to reverse our usual process: we brainstormed together, but I'm doing the bulk of the writing.

This, of course, was the cue for a series of life-shattering catastrophes: a traumatic break-up, a long stint of unemployment, winding up with a sudden upswing in fortunes, including an excellent job that nevertheless leaves me very little "me time".

So yes. Even under the best of circumstances, Chapter 8 would have been a bit tardy. Once I get through the next couple of segments, though, it will wrap up, and we'll be back to our normal process (and pace) for Chapter 9 and beyond.

Right, darkwulf?

... darkwulf?

... could somebody wake up the wulf?

I'm sure you've all noticed that I've run into another round of writer's block lately.

Well, I finally broke through some of that today, and was on a pretty solid roll.

Two or three paragraphs in to HOC Chapter 08.04, alas, my telephone rang. It was a (non-furry) friend of mine, with whom I communicate regularly, and with whom I had just had lengthy conversation both yesterday and the day before.

With that so recently behind us, we thoroughly exhausted topics of conversation fairly quickly. The conversation degenerated into him reading stuff off his Facebook page to me over the phone, since I refuse to participate in that noxious arena personally.

This served to remind me just why I abstained from such a staple of the American Internet diet.

As he finished the second such tidbit and was about to start a third, I interrupted to explain matters to him:

I told him that I was in the middle of writing furry pornography when he called, and that if he insisted on dragging me away from MY computer to read what was on HIS monitor, I would be forced to reciprocate.

He stopped, and quite eloquently described the expression he was now wearing:

While it is always a delight to hear from someone I consider a brother closer than any of my actual siblings, I suspect that, in the future, if I answer his more Porlockian interruptions with "Hello, I'm writing furry porn", it will have a salubrious effect on his ability to maintain relevant and interesting topics of conversation.

I am something of an archaism, I confess, in more ways than my penchant for purple prose: I still listen to the radio on the way to work.

GEICO Insurance runs nearly as many ads on radio as they do on television, and the most recent one is, shall we say, Relevant To Our Interests for reasons more than their anthropormphic mascot.

In this one, the aforementioned Gecko is conversing with a local GEICO representative, and toward the end of the commercial, ask, "Is that a poster of me on the wall?"

Upon hearing a response in the affirmative, he muses, "It's true. The camera really does add ten ounces."

Oh, thinks Typical Classic Rock Aficionado, an amusing permutation of "the camera adds ten pounds", but since he's a tiny lizard, it's in ounces! What wit!

Your Humble Servant, on the other wing, thinks, Wait. Ten ounces? Just how much does a gecko that size weigh?

According to Wikipedia ... two and a half ounces.

I would love to see a poster of GEICO's already-adorable mascot with his weight quintupled.

The big and obvious New Year's Resolution:

GET HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY BACK ON TRACK.

Our outline runs 12 chapters, and it shouldn't be outside the range of possibility to finish it off this year. I'm not going to make that a resolution in itself, but Wuff and I are going to do our damnedest to crank chapters out more regularly.

The second one must be accompanied by an apology. I have been really, really bad about acknowledging favorites and watches, and in 2012, that's going to change right now:

I'd like to thank everyone who's watching my account, as inert as it is,
and who's done me the honor of adding my modest little tales to their list of Favorite Things.
You're the best.

In the coming year, I'll try to be better about responding in one form or another.

I would also like to thank all the wonderful artists who have drawn my greedy little alter-ego in the last year, by commission or by whim. Having such wonderful visuals for Velachko brought a lot of joy to my year, and I hope it brought you all a few extra watchers (and commissions!) as well.

I look forward to seeing folks at Further Confusion in two weeks!

I love being part of this community, and I wish you all the very best in the New Year.

Thank you, everyone. Keep being you, or whomever you want to be.

My most profound apologies to my loyal readers: I was muse-challenged this weekend, and didn't put the finishing touches on this week's segment. I will try to squeeze writing time in during the evenings this week, and get the thing posted before the weekend ... but, alas, it may get pushed up a week.

For those of you who missed the first installment of Chapter 8 last week:
(Link to Part 1)
(Link to Part 2)

Ladies and gentlemen, it's been more than a year since our last installment, and we would like to apologize. Whilst some of the delays have been due to circumstances beyond our control, others have been mere inertia.

We're trying something a bit different with this chapter. It's entirely in the form of Lord Velachko's journal entries -- and I'm just going to post them one or two at a time, trying to build up a buffer that will let me maintain a weekly schedule. At the moment, it looks like Chapter 8 will divide neatly into five parts, but it might run a bit long as I continue to find Lord Val's "voice".

I'm posting the sub-chapters an entry or two at a time; when the final part is ready, I'll post the whole thing as a single, unified Chapter, and I'll move the fragments into Scraps.

(I also reserve the right to treat these as Drafts and make any revisions I might see fit before posting the non-Scrap version!)

While our previous chapters have covered a few hours, or the course of a day (and night, and a few extra courses), this is going to be a time lapse over the space of several weeks.

 darkwulf is going to hold the text version until the whole thing is complete. That may seem backwards, but in this instance, I'm doing most of the writing, and, um, I like word processors and italics and fancy (but legible!) fonts.

Boilerplate:

---

His Official Capacity, by Darkwulf and Velachko, is ©2010, and is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.....-nc-sa/3.0/us/ ;
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 2nd Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/valachko/ and http://www.furaffinity.net/user/darkwulf/.

---

 ccfurs icon by  xerxesqados

 darkwulf just showed me Tim Burton's Secret Formula.

Now I'm seeing His Official Capacity with Tim Burton directing and Danny Elfman composing.

I mean, it's about a Bat -- a species that defines "charmingly creepy but cute" -- who starts out as your typical Burton Sensitive Misfit, and gets dropped into a typically Burton fish-out-of-water exotic-surreal-land story, with typically Burton sinister overtones.

(Darkwulf adds: Just imagine the soundtrack to the animated silverware dream!)

There was a little glitch in one column of the spreadsheet; it's now fixed, so go ahead and download it again.

Same URLs, same filenames:

Here's the OpenOffice Calc version of the spreadsheet, for the cool kids.

Here's the Excel version, for you poor sots still stuck with Microsoft.

Oh, and the original discussion was in  SapphireAMoerlevad's journal.

A few weeks back, someone posted a Pet Peeve journal, grumbling about things that bothered them in weight-gain and gluttony scenes in stories and cartoons, including "disporportionate expansion": characters who devour huge portions and barely bulge, or characters who scarf down something fairly modest and swell immensely. Even the classic scene of Templeton at the Fair suffers from this -- from both aspects in the same scene.

I posted a response confessing that such things distracted me sufficiently that I'd created a spreadsheet to estimate just how big a belly should be after a meal of a given size.

I immediately got a response asking if I could share that spreadsheet.

Alas, I've forgotten both the original poster and the respondant who requested the file, but I finally sat down and got my rough-and-ready reference into something a little easier on the eyes.

Needless to say, it's really just designed to give a ballpark estimate, and has a few unrealistic assumptions:

The Spreadsheet Assumes:
1. Your meal averages out to about the density of water (1 gram/cubic centimeter).
2. Your stomach expands as a perfect sphere. No gravity, no real difference in tissue elasticity. (Note that most humanoid torsos are flattened front to back.)
3. The “waistline” calculations won’t start working properly until the values are substantially larger than your “unfed” dimensions.

Despite all this, it works just fine for rough approximations. If there's demand and my math fu is up to it, I’ll work up a spreadsheet for flattened ellipsoids.

I should note that this is not a weight-gain spread sheet. It's strictly an approximation of how big that undigested lump of food should be after you've cleared out the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, you greedy bastard.


Here's the OpenOffice Calc version of the spreadsheet, for the cool kids.

Here's the Excel version, for you poor sots still stuck with Microsoft.

Excel will actually open ODS files these days, but I put the XLS version up just in case someone has an older version of MS Office.

 darkwulf calls this "number porn".

Trying to get another diary-prologue ready so Darkwulf and I can post the next installment.

My brain is shutting down.

FEED ME!

I'm just sayin'.

That Creative Commons tag is, well, you know. Technical. It's not really eyecatching.

Greetings, Loyal Readers!

His Official Capacity has reached Chapter 5, and most of the pieces are on the board. We're finally past the set-up, and the story is starting to take shape. Rest assured that we're nowhere near the ending -- but  darkwulf tells me that this hasn't stopped people from speculating!

So, let's hear it:

Where do you think this story is going?

What does Samira have in mind for our hungry hero?

Today's Unintentionally Erotic Phrase:

I wanted to know how much the industry understood about how the food we eat affects us; about what I have termed "conditioned hypereating" – "conditioned" because it becomes an automatic response to widely available food, "hyper" because the eating is excessive and hard to control.

Conditioned Hypereating.

Say it with me now, class.

Conditioned Hypereating.

Be still, my fluttering (and inevitably-congested) heart.

It comes from this article, which appeals to me for all the wrong reasons.

It talks about how modern food is engineered to be addictive, to be gobbled quickly, before the body can be properly satiated, so we'll cram that much more into our bellies without realizing it, and to make rich, rewarding food constantly available, so we can do this more or less non-stop.

Those paying attention to the modest little tales that Darkwulf and I collaborate on will understand why this is, as the LOLcats say, "relevant to my interests".


His loving, detailed descriptions of just how modern food (nod just fast food) does this is reads better than most of the erotic gluttony fiction I've found online.

Time to go work on Chapter 5 some more!

Chapter Four Is Finally Up!

Enjoy. It's waaaay past my bedtime.

Gotta get up and have PANCAKES tomorrow! MARDI GRAS!

In an amusing coincidence, my roommate (who knows nothing of my Secret Identity as a dashing and ravenous Chiropteran) brought Chinese food home for dinner last night.

Chopsticks chopsticks om nom nom.

I had an ... interesting ... dream last night.

It was about a video game. The point was to see how effectively you could use chopsticks. Think of it as Chopstick Hero™: instead of a regular controller, the user interface was a pair of wireless chopsticks.

I've always been told that with chopsticks, style and technique are secondary to actually getting the food from dish to mouth. That's how the game was scored: by the quantity of food you could scarf down in a given amount of time. Different kinds of food were easier or harder to handle, just like real life. The courses weren't just limited to Asian cuisine, either -- so long as it was in bite-sized pieces and "chopstickable", it was evidently fair game.

Now, flailing around with chopsticks in mid air wouldn't have had much tactile feedback (or much challenge), so for every onscreen dish, we had a dish of real food in front of the controller. That might just have been the way we were playing it, though.

(Don't ask me who "we" were. I just know I wasn't the only one there. I think I was the only one actually playing, but I always had a fresh dish in front of me for each round.)

Yes, loyal readers, expanding bellies were part of it. Why else would I be posting about it? The bigger your belly on-screen, the better your score. (I don't think anyone will be surprised to learn that my on-screen avatar was a cute little cartoon bat.) Of course, with real food involved, I was filling up nicely off-screen, too.

I was doing all right in the first few rounds, but nothing exceptional. Finally, I realized that nothing said I had to eat politely, and instead of leaving the dish on the table, I picked up the bowl in one hand and started just shoveling the contents in with the chopsticks in the other.

Unfortunately, just as I'd gotten the hang of it, and was settling in for some serious scoring, I woke up.

I was just about finished with the round, too. It was ravioli! I love ravioli!

I don't often get these dreams -- once every few years, maybe.

I want more!

Okay, it's really "almost six hundred", but it SEEMS like more. Six hundred submissions, that is. I had to nuke all the journals -- sorry if I missed anything big or important!

I've been without net access at home since early November for a variety of reasons, and no, I'm NOT gonna check my furry fat fetish pr0n at work!

I've got a nice, shiny Acer Aspire in front of me now, though -- a big-screen version of a netbook, basically -- so I'm back online without having to mooch other people's computers and the like. I can go back to mooching what's really important, like pastries.

Still, even a greedy li'l bat like myself may have limits.

MAY.

So it might take me a couple of days to wade through all this wonderful art. A banquet of bats and bellies!

YUM.

ChefStack Automatic Pancake Machine Celebrates Gluttony

I totally need one of these. I'm all about celebrating gluttony! Just set me up at the business end, and let'er go!

Only 200 pancakes an hour, though. Is one unit going to be enough?

Link via my partner in crime,  darkwulf