Dropbox is moving to an updated shared link architecture where links are based on content rather than on users. This will affect how links are created and shared. The new links can be identified by the presence of an ‘rlkey’ parameter in the URL. I only found this out because a friend mentioned the commission folder refs I've used for years (which are stored on Dropbox) were going to an error message, and new links I generated had a different format.
Info I've found while googling seems to suggest this is going to be happening to everyone, if it hasn't already, so if you run into this issue with your/someone else's ref folder, that's probably what's going on and you'll need them to generate you a new link.

Referenced documents:
https://help.dropbox.com/share/force-download
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Cre.....ot/td-p/689070

TL;DR: Dropbox is changing its link format for security reasons, your old links may no longer work and you might have to generate new ones.

Doing my usual post to remind/warn people tomorrow is April 1st and some people/companies interpret that as "terrify people with entirely believable awful things." Though honestly I feel like things have been getting better on that front after a bit of a dip into not being great for a few years, so hopefully this ends up not being a necessary journal.

Also sounds like it's Trans Visibility Day so be cute/happy/etc in whatever shape suits you best (as per your own evaluation), and if you wanna be large too then go for it and have fun being extra-visible, though not doing that is also valid.


EDIT: Oh hey, not only did Game Freak/The Pokemon Company and SEGA both make proper amusing pranks, they released them a day early to catch people off guard, well done there.

As usual, just a reminder- tomorrow is April Fools, so expect plenty of over-excited reactions to fake info. Hopefully we'll mostly have fun goofy foolery instead of disappointing/cruel pranks.

That is correct, it's time for April Fools Day again, when people are supposed to make funny silly low/medium-effort joke stuff but instead seem to like just shouting anxiety-inducing nonsense and then going :)

Although last year wasn't really too bad at all, a lot less "TERRIBLE THING just kidding :D" and still a decent amount of actually funny stuff. Early pandemic had people in an anxious mood and reading the room, I guess.

Anyway keep an eye out, assume any journals and such you see on the 1st are potentially false until you have time to confirm.

A friend of mine, AlefGP, is hosting a growth drive, and he's asked for assistance from Pamela and Okamitsune.
This is, uh, a bold plan for a growth drive, because those two are VERY good at growing. But Alef is talented, and a big fan of both, so I'm sure he'll be able to handle it, mostly!

You can find out more about it here:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/33322636/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/.....it?usp=sharing
You'll get to vote on new body shapes and even species for both gals as they grow, and donations will help them both zoom upwards- Sunny growing at ridiculous rates, and Pamela taking a more leisurely stroll through sizes!

If you like either or both characters, and/or want to help an awesome wuff, please check it out!

The main reason I'm making this journal is because I've had a lot of friends already message me about the topic and I just want one central place to store my response- yes, I saw about Dynamax. I... don't really have much interest in it? I have less interest in Sword/Shield than I did before the Direct, anyway.

There's a variety of reasons, but the main ones are that I don't really see Dynamax covering any ground I'd be interested in, or at least not more than a fraction of it. From the looks of things, it just works in battle, and sets a Pokemon's model size to about 60 feet or so tall for 3 turns (unless it's an enemy Pokemon in a Raid). Which (among several other elements, for example the fact that I'm way more interested in the process of growth than just the result) just doesn't really line up that well with the sort of things I actually like about macro stuff. I mean, it's nice, sure, but it's more disappointing than interesting, to me. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want them to change it to better suit my interests, because that would end up making the game 1: really weird and 2: probably make it really bad at being a fun 8-20 hour JRPG experience.
Maybe it'll lead to some more macro Pokemon art? But there's already lots of macro Pokemon art at around that scale, and I figure the ones who'll draw it the most are the ones who'd have otherwise been drawing... macro Pokemon art. So it doesn't really change much for me on the furry side of things either.
And on the gameplay side, it feels like the less interesting parts of both Mega Evolution and Z-Moves combined.

Besides that, the Wild Area looks absolutely barren- that might just be a case of them hiding a lot of content that would otherwise clutter the screen enough to diminish the view (it definitely looks scenic), but if that's anywhere near final, eesh. Breath of the Wild's open world worked great because there was always something new to see and interact with waiting around a corner, and you never knew what bizarre new thing you might find- worst case, you could be pretty sure you'd get a Deku Seed out of it if nothing at all else. I definitely don't see anything like that in Wild Area so far.

I wasn't super sold on any of the new designs they showed off either, but, they've shown like 5 Pokemon out of presumably way more than that, and most of these were the early-game stuff. I'm not at all bothered on that front, and don't consider that a mark against Sword/Shield. Nothing really offended me (except Corviknight's name and lack of armor, at least TalonFlame just owns its lack of effort and doesn't pretend it's some clever wordplay that isn't there, geez), and at least a couple designs seem like things friends would enjoy.


Sword and Shield look like they're be fine. They'll be new mainline Pokemon games- some additions, some subtractions, standard excellent level of quality for the series (with the aforementioned concerns RE: Wild Area content). But I, personally, VDO, didn't see anything that made me more interested in the games, and there was a decent amount that made me less interested. Which is fine! It's not a game made specifically for me. And maybe later trailers will show things that get me back on board. And people seem to be getting pretty hype for it, judging by how many people excitedly messaged me about it. So that is good! I am okay with the Direct, even if I didn't care much about what I saw.

One definite plus for me, though- Growlithe shown off in the trailer while talking about old region Pokemon being in. A huge worry I had during the Sun/Moon hype period was that all the rumors about Alola Arcanine being a weird water-type which inexplicably sacrificed all its floof for fins might turn out to be true, and we'd just be seeing un-floof Arcanine going forward. Anyone who's grabbed the VDODex ( Very NSFW, https://www.furaffinity.net/view/30656214/ ) definitely has seen that I am super into the idea of making things better via Arcaninification, but I like Arcanine's base design, and it wasn't yet clear how much or how little the Alola forms were going to serve as replacements or alternatives for the base designs!


Comments closed on this one because there's not much more to say and it's not a topic I really want to discuss much further at the moment- no need to apologize if you excitedly messaged me about this (thank you, if you did! <3), I appreciate the thought and absolutely do not blame you for not expecting me to have such a surface-seemingly anti-VDO response to bigness!

Posing this hypothetical to encourage backing up your important files! I just had a SSD go on me over the weekend, just locked up dead mid-use and never got recognized as anything more than a cold brick of metal again. However, due to a severe data paranoia gathered over years of hearing horror stories about lost essential files vanished forever into the digital void where they were eaten by a pudgy Renamon or something, I have duplicate backups at local and remote locations of basically all my files (with another remote backup for the most importantest of important ones). I've slapped in a new drive and I'm almost entirely back up and running, already.
I didn't even lose my open browser tabs across two separate browsers. That was kinda cool!

Seriously though make backups of anything you don't want to lose, ASAP, and regularly (automatically if you can manage it!).

So don't freak out too much over the "I HAVE BECOME A NUN AND AM DELETING MY ACCOUNT, THANKS AND GOODBYE FOREVER" journals. Also keep an eye out for the usual goofiness.

A commission from  commoddity of, uh, well, what do you think I'd get? NSFW, but very sweet and growy <3
https://commoddity.tumblr.com/post/.....mature-content

Over the last couple of years I've commissioned a lot of art from  jupiterjyohti. These vary from quick sketchy partial-page images to detailed full-pages, with a full color character ref sheet thrown in there too for my Glaceon Estelle. The content is basically the sort of stuff you'd expect from me, and lots of it- Arcanines, divinity, growth, macro, hyper, paws, fluff, all that kinda bigness. Plenty of NSFW and SFW alike, so be warned.

Jupiter is selling most of this content in art packs at silly-low prices. There's the 2014-mid 2016 set, about 100 distinct images, for $1.50, and the rest of 2016-2017 set, over 200 images, for $2.00.
That is a lot of content for very little money- although you can pay more than the minimum if you want!

This is content that is planned to be posted to FA for free access over time, but slowly- there's a lot to go up, and Jupiter has lots of other things to post as well. Not to mention how far behind I am on posting anything at all (getting close to literally half a decade, if you do the math~). If you want to get a whole bunch now all at once, though, please consider grabbing one or both of these packs.

I know I'm normally pretty hard to reach already, but I've been almost totally unavailable for the last half-week, and will be similarly extra-hard to reach for the latter half of this week as well. I expected to have a bit more downtime, but I'm clearly going to be a bit distracted for a while, sorry!

I'll try to respond to any current open questions and comments and notes and such before I head out again. And if you have a commission-related matter, please send it anyway, and I'll do my best to respond ASAP so as to not hold you up. But I can't promise even my usual slow levels of response for a bit.

It's all good stuff, though, no worries on my end.

EDIT: Yay I'm back, now to catch up on things.

So expect that to be a thing.

Fluffy Arcanines + grooming mode = welp for VDO <3

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8lfI66T5II video proof of the grooming, Arcanines were revealed on the Japanese site a while back.

I've been silent and unreachable for a while now. Sorry about that. I suffer from seasonal depression, although thankfully it doesn't take the form of self-harm or desires to do so. It's more the "draw in upon yourself and avoid social contact" sort. I figured I'd already dealt with it for the year earlier on, but it had never really cleared up properly at the time and it's definitely worse now than it was earlier this year.

I don't know how much longer it'll last, but I do think it's fading a bit. I'm going to be taking things very slow, though, so apologies again if I still don't respond for a fair while.

Please don't send me notes or such about this journal. I really do appreciate the thoughts, and thank you for them, but like I said: I'm still in the "avoiding social contact" phase. This is more of a heads-up to some folks who I know have been asking around after me who I'd rather not worry.

I'll at least try to contact people who've messaged me about open commission work tomorrow, as I don't want to hold that up for them. I'll work towards replying to the rest as mental states permit.

Right. Hello, and welcome back to the many 'new' watchers! Normally I'd go to your pages and thank you individually, but there's a ton of you and I assume all of you are rewatching on new accounts instead of actually new. I apologize if this is wrong!

I am currently not planning to move to another site- I have too many things posted here that I would want to bring over, and although I have copies of all the description writeups for my uploads saved, it'd still be significant work to transfer over and we've established quite clearly that I can't even keep up with maintaining one FA gallery, much less multiple sites' worth. I know the new kid on the block has an auto-importer, but their UI is in alpha and literally can't scroll through more than a few pages of gallery items at a time without starting to show repeats or skip items entirely (thus earning itself a spot in my art site tier list between Twitter and Tumblr, which is a position I never expected to even exist) so I'm gonna let the devs work on that a bit more before I consider moving over.

I am planning to wait a little longer before uploading anything further, to give more people a chance to recover their account or decide to make a new one. Also lazy.

I think that's most of the news for now?

So that's a thing to keep an eye out for.

EDIT: I'm not planning anything, no worries! Just pointing this out to hopefully minimize the number of "OH NO I'M LEAVING FA FOREVER SORRY EVERYONE ;_;" fake journals.

I think that was about a month? It felt like a month. I think you might have to round up but it started in February and that's a short month so I'm gonna call that a month.

Please bear with me if it takes me a while to get back to you about something, I'm going to be trying to catch up over the weekend in fairly random order. Thank you for bearing with me if you did, no worries if you abandoned me for lack of fresh content, I'm probably forgetting something here but that's okay because I've forgotten several things.

hello yes i am in a state which is presumably not dead

Work this week was a thing. "Other duties as assigned" which I am certainly looking forward to the end of with bated breath. Same thing next week and the week after, too. Probably easy stuff by most people's standards but it is things I absolutely hate and was not at all prepared for and I've sort of gotten home only partially functional every night this week.

I apologize for not interacting with anyone in any way for like five days straight, I will be trying to catch up on things tomorrow. If you were waiting to hear back from me about something, I will try to reply then! As for now, back to sleep. Thank you and goodnight!

Hey, doing an early morning stream. Won't be all day like last time, but gonna knock out a few commission writeups. You can peek in at https://picarto.tv/VDOPlus , and also enjoy artistic stylings by  stampy and  alterflane!

If you didn't make it, don't fret- this is all stuff that'll be posted to FA anyway!

Hey remember when I used to do streams? I'm doing one again! With company, even! It's the awesome  stampy inking some cutebigs. And I'm doing it solo!
https://picarto.tv/VDOPlus <- The new Streamplace

No requests this time, I'm writing commission descriptions for art from 2014. Yes, really. There'll be intermittent breaks to move laundry around but I'm gonna try to do this for a while, at least.

Stream complete! Oh gosh words happened.

Just so everyone knows. I know people have been trying to contact me in a few places, and I'm sorry about responding to that slowly and/or out of order. I was out for the weekend at a wedding (not mine!) and have had a heck of a time catching up, probably because I didn't do much sleeping over the weekend, which tends to leave me not too much fun to talk to anyway. I'll be catching up with people in a bit.

Also the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game just came out today, so that might slow things down as well if it's as good as people seem to be saying.


On an entirely unrelated note, if one of the reasons you're watching me is for art of extreme size differences and pawsy stuff, and you didn't already know about it,  stampy is posting up a series commissioned by  artie that I helped with which might be of interest to you. You can start off here, but it's still ongoing, so expect things to get even more out of control by the end!

Are a thing now! And are also a properly sorted thing now! You can browse my gallery by your favorite characters and/or topics. Or just stick to the art, or writing, if you want! It's taken me a while to assign everything, and I've likely missed one or two categories here and there, but I've been through my entire gallery and tossed everything into at least ONE category.

If you like some of my uploads, but don't quite have the same bizarre expanse of weird interests I do, this is a nice way to limit things to what you enjoy.

I'd also like to take this moment to once again thank all the artists and writers who have accepted my nonsense commissions and represented my silly characters. It's much appreciated, and I wish you the best!

So yeah, I was kinda scarce last week, sorry! Ended up getting sucked pretty deep into Summer Games Done Quick, spent most of my spare time (and plenty of time I didn't really have to spare) watching that. I'll be resuming relatively normal operation going forward for now, although I do think I'll pull back on posting stuff to once every 2-3 days (excluding direct sequences), for multiple reasons. If I go nearly a week without posting ANYthing, though, be sure to poke me about it.