Wanna move the Jornals along and can't think of anythign positive to say eight now (god, I'm so old and cranky!). Ask me whatever and I'll see if I can't come up with useful answers.

I thought I might have explained this before, but it bears reiterating;

Megamorphics is a macrophile-based Amateur Press Association (APA) I created in 1997 (for details on what an APA is, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateu.....ss_association ). I created the magazine because I like books and I thought it would be fun and cool to see people's art and stories in hardcopy - there is something really satisfying about creating a book or other publication and getting to the point where you can hold it in your own two hands.

At the time, the only subject I could think of where I knew a whole lot of creative folks, was "macrophilia". a term coined by Uncle Kage to represent folks who liked giants and giantesses. In those days, my main online social hangout was "The Giant's Club" on FurryMuck, and as a result, the initial membership consisted of GC regulars and a few folks I knew who also liked drawing or writing about giant furry characters.

The APA did and does have a limited number of members, although the number has changed (increased) over the years- that choice was made, not to be elitist or exclusive but to make life easier on the editor, to keep costs down, and to make it more personal for the members. Other APAs at the time, like Rowrbrazzle, had dozens of members and each issue was hundreds of pages (an issue of 'Brazzle was often two or more "books" each), and I really couldn't see how the members managed to read it all, much less comment meaningfully on that many submissions.

Joining the APA has always been a matter of asking, or being recommended by a current member: as long as there are open membership slots, the editor puts it to the membership, who vote on if they're ready to have the applicant join the group. As long as you have something to contribute and you're trying (showing potential) there's a good chance to get in.

One of my big goals with MegaMorphics was to make it a bit more "professional" than the average APA, so I opted to bind the issues and give them card-stock color covers. As time went by, the editors that replaced me upped the ante steadily, first with glossy color covers, then plastic cover-sheets, and finally professionally printed perfect-bound glossy color books.

Megamorphics went on hiatus in the early 2000's, when I hit a bad patch personally. My best friend and housemate at the time, Ken Cougar, offered to take it over and made a whole bunch of improvements in how it worked and looked. Then it went on hiatus again when we sold the house in New Jersey, I moved to Texas and he and his wife moved to California. At that point, Bennie Tiger picked up the baton; it was he who started printing it with a POD service and turned it into the fancy magazine it is today.

People often ask is the APA is for sale. Unfortunately, the answer to that is "No." Very early on, there was some thought to making copies for sale - selling the extra copies would help fund the magazine. But since the members *are* the magazine, it was put to the membership if they were comfortable with the idea of selling copies. As it turned out, a number of them were not, and at least one was downright hostile to the idea. So the idea was sidelined. Every few years we've discussed the idea, and every time it gets nixed. I've considered starting up a sister title that would allow members to submit stuff and the magazine would be commercially available, but the trouble with that is I don't really have the time or place for it right now, and figuring out the logistics of publishing a magazine for-profit.

And that's the gist of things! As I write this, issue #55 is on my desk, and has been for a week or two, which is why I'm releasing the art to the public (most of the members eventually post what was in the APA on FA). Hopefully that clears things up for folks.

-Wolf

I'm back!
After a week in California I am once again in the (now every soggy) Dallas: I swear, I go away for a week and Texas turns into Florida, weather-wise, what the heck is up with that?
Had a great time aside from the delays in the flight getting home, which were cheerfully made more bearable (kinda fun, in fact) by certain impish mice and red pandas.
Gotta work today of course which kinda puts a minor temporary damper on things, but the house thing looks like it's gonna happen soon, and I'm super excited by that, and looking to get a bunch of art done, maybe even stream tonight, depending on how I feel after work!

I should update my age in my profile, it's just a *liiiiitle* bit off...as in several years, and shortly by one more.
As a result, I will not be around a ton coming next week, and no streams next Wednesday or the Saturday after that - I know I haven't been streaming a lot lately anyways, but birthday stuff's going to happen.

I'll be in California for a bit, so who knows, it might be fun to try to stream from San Jose, instead of streaming *to* San Jose!

Okay I guess I should note that my birthday is on the 20th, I was just putting up the notice so folks would know why there were no streams over the next little bit!

Ask me stuff, before I start ranting about gun-nerds!

I'm noticing that the resized images on the pages look ..well, frankly, freaking awful; really blurry like whatever algorithm/code they're using to display the resized images suck-balls in the least pleasant fashion possible. http://www.furaffinity.net/view/16359415/ would be my primary example right now. It looks like I used an out-of-focus camera until you click on it to see the full-sized image.
Anyone know if this is browser-based, a setting I need to check, or is this just an example of a poorly-chosen bit of code?
I can understand resizing the images, that's fine, but it's disturbing when it looks like I need to fix my scanner or replace my eyeglasses.

Edit: It's been pointed out to me that the issue seems to be restricted to vertically oriented images (portait format), which means that the algorithm isn't handling vertical compression gracefully. So either there's a misconfiguration or the algorithm's just plain old unsmart. You'd think someone would have caught that.
"Fuck it, we'll do it live!" ?

Edit, the Second: Apparently the staff caught on to the issue (and others) and rolled back the changes with the promise not to do that again without a bunch more testing and community involvement: Go FA Staff!

Tossing this out to folks: I'm looking for feedback on pens for inking, because I'm feeling the need to step up my game for coloring images and the thing that's holding me back is inking.

I'm looking for pens that are easy to use, portable, relatively available and moderately priced. Felt-tips, ball-points, ?????. Obviously, really good black ink is required. DKTorzi recommended the Pilot Hi-Tec pens and they're definitely good, but not very available - and so far I've only found them in a 0.3 mm tip, which turns out to be too small for a lot of what I do. So multiple tip sizes is also needed.

I'm picking up some Staedtler Pigment Liners this evening, since Staples carries them (albeit irregularly).

What are folks using? Do you have recommendations from other folks?

And before folks ask: I'm not comfortable with, or set-up for, digital inking - I'm *really* not comfortable or set-up for inking with brush or dip-pens, and they really, really don't count as portable.

If I could afford one of the little Cintiqs, I'd love to try one, but it's awfully pricey for something that I might *not* like.

Apologies to folks for the delay on shipping the sketchbooks: work and winter have combined to make this a difficult few weeks, but all the books that have been paid for have been shipped.

I guess I meed to explain this so it makes sense (and perhaps release another book to remove the confusion entirely).

The first two books I ever released were Sketchbooks one and two, they were small-format books about the size of a paperback, because they were based on the mini-sized sketchbooks I was using heavily at the time. They were literally a 100-page sketchbook, the entire thing, front to back, the idea being that people could see what were essentially my "notes", the stuff that would (hopefully) become full-sized pieces later.

The third book I released, I entitled "Sketchbük #1", because unlike the first two books, it wasn't an entire sketchbook: the book I had been sketching in was peculiar, it turned out to only have 80 pages in it, and since I liked the idea of the book being 100 pages I added in 20 other images, making it, technically, not a sketchbook like the first two books. Thus the funny name.

Recently I stopped working in sketchbooks for a while; I've been playing with two very distinctly different art styles, and rather than fill a sketchbook with false-starts I fell back on my old standard, which was drawing on loose paper. So when I opted to do a book for Furry Fiesta, my best recent work was all on loose paper. I opted, rather than be pedantic, to just call it a sketchbook. I was, frankly, a little too clever for my own good with the naming scheme. The next books will probably all be themed, so that should just confuse things even more.

I'm looking for feedback on this: I have a new book out and I'm planning on re-releasing all of the old books I have done, but I'm pondering streamlining the process.

Previously, I had the books printed, shipped to me, and then I handled the shipping. This could be problematic, especially for international customers, since it meant me packing them, finding out what the shipping would cost, letting the customer know so they could pay, then actually taking them into the post office. This was slow and a lot of work, but being something of a control-freak, it meant I was able to monitor the entire process.

However, since I print through Lulu, and I'm considering selling a number of different books now, the option of putting them up for sale on Lulu and letting people just buy them and ship them from Lulu is starting to look more and more attractive. This also has the added benefit that Lulu has print/distribution centers all over the world and a buyer is liable (though not guaranteed) to have have a print/distribution center in their country which makes shipping cheaper and faster. Also, I believe that Lulu takes credit cards and debit cards from all over, whereas I can only work through Paypal and snailmai.l

The downsides are of course that I don't have the control over the process that I did, I make marginally less profit on each book, since Lulu would be taking a cut, and my payout would be slower since Lulu pays out on a scheduled basis and not.

What are your opinions and recommendations? Do any of you have experience with doing this yourselves? Are there better alternatives?

I'm not feeling very keen on streaming: it's cold, it's dark, it's raining (and has been for days now). You'd think it would be the perfect time to stream, but frankly it's a total buzz-kill. I might stream later but I won't promise anything, and if I do there won't be any announcement, it'll likely just be me futzing around with stuff that needs finishing (oh gods, there is so much that needs finishing).

It kind of goes without saying but I'll be at TFF (after all, I live like 30 minutes form the hotel). I have a table in the dealer's room, so you'll be able to find me there. I'm hoping to have several books out for the convention (some older ones and one new one).

What is it with furry artists/writers and exploding computers?

I am forever and a day seeing posts from one person or another mentioning that their system BSODed, blew-up, caught-fire, got-virused, or otherwise ceased to function in a most demonstrably final fashion. Is it bad luck? Bad equipment? Bad environment? Bad habits? What?

I'll generally have a computer for *years*, and the most common source of issues is my own meddling - hardware upgrades gone wrong is the primary offender, usually either an issue with configuration or drivers.

So I offer up Wolf's Rules For PC Survivability is the hopes of minimizing and surviving such trauma. These are in no order of importance, just as I thought of them;


1) Have Antivirus software and keep it updated. Microsoft Security Essentials/ Defender are free and actually work pretty well as long as you have good browsing and email habits.

2) Do NOT use Internet Explorer. Between its core deficiencies and the Microsoft design philosophy of trying to automate everything for their users, it's just way too happy to do things for you that you don't want and don't even know it's doing. Chrome and Firefox have their own peculiarities, but are better at not "doing things for you".

3) Install NOTHING that you did not decide from the get-go that you wanted to install; just assume that anything that pops up unexpectedly on your screen or in your browser is poison most lethal. If you end up with your browser "stuck" on a page where it's demanding that you download/install something and you can't get off/away from the page, do Control-Alt-Delete and kill your browser from the task manager. You may have to do it a couple times because most browsers now will try to recover from crashing a couple times when you re-start them, which means it'll take you back to the same foul page.

4) NEVER click a file or link in your email program unless you know who it's from and what it is, and even then it's best to be a little paranoid; it's really easy to spoof addresses, create fake links, and embed small executables in email. If you aren't sure what it is, just plain don't click on it.

5) Keep your computer safe and clean. This sounds a little silly, but honestly, put the computer itself where it's not going to get stuff piled on it, or knocked into it, and it's not going to get kicked or knocked off the table. Keep the case closed - I remember one of the mucks going down one day because the admin had the server on his desk with the case left open, and knocked a can of Coke into it. Buy yourself a couple cans of compressed air at the computer store, and every 6-months to a year, turn off the computer, unplug it, open the case and blow out all the dust - get yourself a dust-mask and squint a lot. You will be shocked and horrified at the cloud of dust and dustbunnies.

6) If you have the option, store as much of your personal files and information on any disk-drive other than C:. C: is where Windows lives; if Windows borks (BSOD, driver issue, bad Windows Update, etc.) as it does occasionally, and you *have* to reload Windows, a half-way decent technician will just format C: and re-install Windows. You'll lose your program files and whatever was on C:, but if it's done right, nothing else.

7) Apply the "KISS!" principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!); find a setup that works for you and don't fuck with it. Nothing seems to mess with Windows more than constantly installing and uninstalling software. Try to minimize the number of task-bars, widgets and add-ons that you install; they may look cool, but they're resource-eaters and often aren't very well written.


It's nowhere near a comprehensive list, but it seems to work for me. Admittedly I've been doing this since before computers even *had* hard-drives, so I'm hardly an "average user", but this is stuff everyone can do, and hopefully helps keep you all merrily computing with must less stress and hassle!

-Wolf

It's all  Genesisw's fault.
I'm always looking out for new and interesting mechanical pencils (my pencil-bag tells me so); and she regularly bumps jetpens.com, so I decided to have a look at what they had. I came across the Uni "Kuru Toga Roulette", a pencil that has an "automatic lead-rotation mechanism" meaning that the lead automatically rotates slightly each time you use it, so you get less of the flat-spots on the lead, reducing unwanted line-width variations and galling of the paper/bristol; especially good for me since I shade by cross-hatching.

The Roulettes come in a couple different models and grades, I bought the top-end one because I was looking for metal-bodied pencils to see if I liked a heavier pencil and the rotation mechanism, and because I felt like buying a "nice" pencil. It turns out it works pretty well and I like the pencil a lot, but I'm also not going to buy a whole bunch of really expensive pencils, so I bought some of the lower-end ones as well (same mechanism, they're just plastic-bodied). I actually like them too, the only downside is that plastic pencils are gonna get broken eventually if you use them a lot, and ordering from jetpens is quick, but not quick enough if you're jonesing to draw.

So you will imagine my surprise and delight when, while on a trip to Office Max to buy some cable-ties, I came across them in the "Writing Supplies" aisle. They're marketed under the Uni-Ball brand, and are surprisingly lacking in any other really obvious model-name/model-numbers other than a very small "Uni Kuru Toga" on the lower left below the blister-pack. At least in my local store, the packaging was in English and French, which was peculiar for Texas.

By now, most people are aware of yesterday's attack in France. For those of you who are not, a group of Islamic extremists raided the offices of a French satirical publication, Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly), murdered 12 individuals including executing two police officers, and wounded 10 more. This is in retaliation for publishing *drawings*. The level of hatred, narrow-mindedness and lunacy involved staggers the mind.

It seems to me that this fandom/community, whatever you wish to call it, should be especially sympathetic to the victims and the community of Charlie Hebdo; these people were hated, reviled, and ultimately murdered, simply for what they drew. The subject of the drawings is, ultimately, moot; they were just drawings, pencil and ink on paper, pixels on a screen. The idea that they were worth persecuting, harming, killing for, no matter how much you might dislike or disagree with the drawings, is the epitome of narrow-mindedness and intolerance.

At the same time I think we should also be sympathetic to the peace-loving Muslims of the world, because it seems to me that the plight of being lumped in with the extremists, the aberrants, the deviants associated with ones community/culture, by the media and the brave faceless ranks of Anonymous, should also be familiar to us.

To the perpetrators of this madness: May Allah treat you with the same mercy and benevolence that you showed your victims.

#JESUISCHARLIE


edit: Please don't descend into arguments on faith/religion and the interpretations of religious texts, I'll hide the comments if you do.

So I am returned from the far northern lands of Canada (Quebec). There will be, shortly, a resumption of streams (probably tomorrow, even).

Sad fact: my apartment is Dallas is colder than my parent's house in Canada.

Tonight will mark the last stream I do for a while: nothing serious just the holidays are upon us and I'll be out and about doing things until such time as I have time again to resume doing streams - probably some time in January, assuming that I don't do something like a New Years Stream.


-Wolf

As some of you may be aware, I am a fan of "simple luxuries", the kind of stuff that costs a little more, but is just so much nicer than its dead-cheap/generic counterpart.

Thus I am a fan of "MexiCoke" (the Mexican CocaCola) for the fact that it's in glass bottles and uses real cane-sugar - there is a distinct pleasure in sipping an ice-cold Coke from a glass bottle.

I'm also a fan of what's locally known as "Dublin" Dr. Pepper, even though the Dublin plant no longer bottles it; the Dublin plant was at one time one of the very last plants in the US still bottling Dr. Pepper using cane-sugar, and in glass bottles, until the corporation cancelled their contract.

Happily, another bottling plant in the area agreed to step-up and continue production, and with the added perk that now you can get Dr. Pepper made with cane-sugar, in 12oz cans, at less than half the price of the 8oz bottles (2 six-packs for $5).

That's the start of the evil, the good Dr. Pepper cheap. The continuation of the evil is that last night I discovered that they have opted to carry the entire *line* of Dublin Bottling Works sodas, all of it in bottles, all of it with cane-sugar instead of corn-syrup (I dunno about other folks, but it really makes a difference in the taste, for me). So now I have a whole bunch of locally made sodas to try.

And sadly, not the big sexy kind...

Recently I was poked with the idea that I should set up a wishlist on Amazon.com. I'm, frankly, terrible to buy for; I'm old enough, live by myself, and earn a decent living, such that when there's something I really want/need, I buy it. That leaves things that I *kinda* want or need for gifts, and when asked, I'm pretty much guaranteed not to remember what any of those things are.

So, today I started randomly entering words into Amazon, relating to things I like, or things I'd kinda like to have but really don't need. Most of the time, the results have been at least marginally useful, enough so that there are some nice items on my wishlist now, things I don't need but would certainly enjoy receiving. Very occasionally the searches turned up really curious items (including one I bought that I'll elaborate on in a later post).

However, when I put in "hyena" (you *had* to know that was coming), one of the first things that came up was a book, "Every Sunset Forever (Hyena Heat Book 3)". The cover was dubiously Harlequin Romance, one of those "bodies pressed together" bodice-ripper covers. I thought "Okay, must be some sort of metaphoric reference there, not actually having anything to do with hyenas." But being bored and curious, I Googled the title and author's name.

Nope, it was not, in fact, metaphorical at all! Based on the synopses, the stories are soft-core porn; in every single one (at least of these three) the heroine is a, haunted, tortured female werewolf, separated from her pack and/or abused and/or (chose from usual list of heartbreaking issues associated with trashy romance), surrounded by a pack of huge hunky male were-hyenas. It was *all* of the trappings of bad romance fanfic. And then to tip me over the edge, JakeRabbit had to point out to me that the series was named "Wild Shifter Babes".

I spent about twenty minutes giggling like a loon at all the cliches you become painfully aware of after skimming fanfics online for too many years. As a purveyor of smut I'm probably the last person who should be casting stones, but at the same time, I'm forced to wonder aloud: do the people who write this stuff *recognize* the horrible trite cliches they're writing? Are they merely pandering to a market? Or are they, like, actually serious about this?

Just had a chuckle-inducing moment: I went into the kitchen to get myself a can of Coke out of the fridge. The last case of coke I picked up, the cans have the slogan "Share a Coke with a" and then a large word printed under it - in the case of the empty can on my desk, it says "Friend".
The can I got, when I grabbed it, I glanced at it and I could have sworn is said "Share a Coke with Buddha". Of course what it actually said was "Share a Coke with a Buddy". After that I just kept chuckling a bit at the idea of "my buddy Buddha".
Mind, what little I remember about Buddha from philosophy and religion courses in school, he *was* a pretty chill dude, so maybe he wouldn't have minded hanging out and having a Coke.

The last of the stream commissions being this weekend, following this the streams are going to become more intermittent: there's a lot of stuff needs doing for the end of the year, and for the holiday season. I need to push harder with the house hunting, I'm going back to visit my folks in Canada for Christmas, I want to re-do my web-site to incorporate the streaming page and update it to something that's not quite so 1990's, I want to assemble more books for Furry Fiesta, possibly a calendar, possibly digital collections, there's just plain too much that needs doing that's going to take up weekends and evenings. I'll announce the streams here when they happen and I'll try and make sure to announce them on my twitter.
Stream commissions *may* resume next year: on that I am not 100% sure, I'm quirky about doing them as it is and currently I'm leaning away from them again, simply because there are times when it's not entirely fun, and fun is why I do them (the money is mostly just pocket-change to do silly stuff).

-Wolf

So  vivzmind has finished her animated video for Kesha's "Die Young" *
http://vimeo.com/110478181
Way better than the official video, IMNSHO, although it *does* seem a little rushed in places compared to earlier animatics - I think she was just trying to get it *done* finally. Personal animation projects seem to suffer from that pretty commonly.
I adore the bright colors, the bounce and energy, Jiji's expressiveness and liveliness!

Since I'm bumping animated music videos, I might as well bump these as well, that I was directed or ran across yesterday. Fan-made projects hold a spot near and dear to my heart, because they always seem so purely creative, they're done out of love for the subject.

MysterBen27's video for Mystery Skull's "Ghost"
http://youtu.be/YlEb3L1PIco?list=UU.....X7nt6VAfmiQdzg
and "Money"
http://youtu.be/lhjk5x54bsE?list=UU.....X7nt6VAfmiQdzg

Extra kudos for amusing use and abuse of pop-culture characters!

*shout-out to  jakerabbit for directing me to the Vivzmind video this morning!

UPDATED 10/23/14
We're coming up on the end of the commissions list (faster than I had anticipated, actually).

As such we are also coming up on the point where I am going to start dropping names from the list if you've chronically not shown up in any of the streams -Last night I went through the entire list of remaining names on call-out looking for people to do their commission. If you're on the list and can't make it to streams, don't have the money, don't have an idea, or changed your mind, please met me know. I'm going to start including the folks who doubled-down when they asked for commissions. Generally when I get town to five or six names, if I don't see you in the stream once in a while, I'll summarily remove your name from the list, so I can get back to doodling for amusement's sake. Dropping names from the list will begin following this Saturday's stream (10/25/14).

Hyenafur
Djagir
TigerClaw
EraDragon
CeruleanRuby
Draylen
Tikki

ATung (second commission)

Because people keep asking where they are on the list.
This is what remains after the dozen I've done so far, so you can see it's going to take a while. There's a couple folks who doubled-up (asked for a commission and waited two weeks and asked for another one), which is technically by the rules, I guess - I specified you had to wait two weeks after your first stream commission to ask for your next, the implication being you had to get it before asking for the next one, but it wasn't stated specifically. I'll consider them when I get to them.
If you change your mind and want off the list, let me know and I'll remove you. Keep in mind that the "order" is also affected by who shows up for the streams -Molly was almost half way down the list on Saturday, but people didn't show up or left and weren't around when their name was called, so hers got done. Same thing on Wednesday, went six down the list because people weren't there.

Werevixen
Shibiru
Linnaeus
ATung
Insomnicon
Miafillene
Kagur
Qxxx
Ich
ColeSutra
Cornelius
BrotherFluffy
Ilkarin
Hyenafur
Sashi
Fishbo
Djagir
Pathia
Deleter
TigerClaw
EraDragon
Hetzer
CeruleanRuby
Draylen
Tikki
Jenora (second commission)
Leonidae (second commission)
ATung (second commission)

I'll be closing the list for new entries come Wednesday at midnight (24:00 hours CST on 09/10/14) - at this point I have several months worth of stream commissions to do, and I don't want to overextend myself, so if you want one, you need to get on the list, otherwise you're liable to have to wait until some time next year.