Sigh, I’m gearing up to update my website and it’s going to be hell on Earth, I know it. I have a reasonable rough for the design of the site. Strangely I’m going to go back to a design similar to the one right before this one. Though with more color and art made for the design and a wordpress framework, so that I can update the thing easily.

I’m planing to pre-build a few different designs so that I won’t be sitting on the same look for two or three years. The main page will have my journal on it but it’ll only have image links or thumbnails. All of the images will be moved to a gallery system that I fear I’m going to break wordpress in half to make. Crosses fingers. On the other hand, I’m also going to add shopping cart buttons to all of the images that aren’t sketches so that I can maybe start selling prints of all this stuff I’ve made. Also having all the art and comics in the Gallery/store area will, I pray, make the site look more professional. As the images will no longer accompany posts with battering on, much like this one. =/

I’m also going to be removing some of the features that I thought I wanted when I started using Wordpress. The main one I’m tossing out is the calender… and the sidebar and the category links (well not completely they just won’t be formated the same way) and maybe some of the ads. Considering just how many posts I have on this beast of a site, the joy of fixing everything, is not something I’m looking forward to. Also I’m probably going to turn on comments and display them which means I have to hide a bunch of the comments that I already have and or edit some of the ones with personal info, or the ones that ask me for porn… or curse me out in Spanish. =D

But here’s some of the art that I’m working up for the site design.

“People think that cats dream of running hard and fast just to feel the ground move under their feet. But Snowy dreamed of waves and ripples and swimming in the sea with goldfish, gliding gracefully with the current. The fish made it all sound so amazing, he didn’t know why his human kept throwing things at him when he tried to go swimming.”

Or there’s always the alternate write up for this image of: “Diana likes cats! White is easy to color! I R good arter!” O_o

The Little Narwhal

The original unicorn! Ah whales… how can you make them hot? I know, draw them as youthful dudes wearing sea weed. Though I’m freaked out to find out on google that narwhals DO NOT have a horn and in fact it is actually a long tooth. The way I’ve drawn it here it’d have to go through his brain. =D

Bonus: HA HA HA HA HA I made it more like a tooth!!! Poor Narwhal dude.

Pushing that other post off the top of the page. So last week I battled a losing battle against spam bots… In the end I banned a large set of ip addresses from Turkey… sorry Turkey. I figure some of you guys will be happy that the spam robot using some part of my site to send email is no longer able to send stuff. Or something. I don’t know I’m still poking around my site trying to figure out how to really block the bot and find and close up however they are getting in… yet I still don’t know what’s really going on. =/

Also somehow someone had come in and inserted hidden spam in the header of my wordpress theme. Somehow. Which blows my mind. I have no idea how long it had been there either. Maybe half a year. I was using an older version of Wordpress for a long time. Thankfully no one coming to my site got spammed by it since it was invisible but poor Google sure saw it. (Edit and I think Google was punishing me for it as well… LOL my hits from Google were all but choked off for the last month or so and now that I’ve taken off the stupid spam they have resurged close to where they were before. So, thankfully that means I’ve probably only had the spam headers from maybe the beginning of April when I had the huge spike for April fools.)

I really want to change the design of my site. The hard part is that I have so many needs. I want a journal but I also want a more simple gallery structure but I also would like to put my comics up on here. So that’s like 3 different things… oh and also I want a shop. Damn that’s 4 things. The figuring out how to get all of that stuff to work together is killing this pretty good. I can figure out how to get two of them going maybe 3 if I use a paypal wordpress plugin but the comic bit, that’s the tough part. I think I could do everything with Wordpress and comicpress and a paypal plugin but then I’d have to make a theme that could display it all nicely and find the time to probably repost all of my site so that the comic posts and the picture posts were separate from all of the journal posts. Nargh.

Maybe I should just start over… hmmm.

Must not post! Must not post! Must not! Shit… okay, so that ill made and poorly thought out Open Source Boob Project? Right that thing, hmm here’s a link that doesn’t make me want to kill everyone: http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/9338.html

So that thing showed up and the SFF part of my LJ friends list have already carved it up good, and then burn the body, poisoned it, kicked it into a well, plugged the well, dropped a mountain on it… with dynamite, and burned the town next to it and three quarters of the villages nearby.

See though, I’d love to have the ability to put in clear words the feelings I get reading the *responses* to this ill made and poorly thought out project but OMG I run screaming. It’s like the energy, the essence is just the purest wail of high emotions rung like a bell made from the torn rib cage of someone’s back with no skin on it so every sound, voice, and word is a hammer… and I feel that ringing sound from the farthest away that I can get…

I can’t deal, my personal pet peeve is a silence of conversation. I can’t take it. I feel like I’m drowning in an ocean of voices that has been carpet bombed by completely understandable highly personal pain and suffering that chokes out all voices. A piece of death and bile of something rotten in the still black water. Fuck and I’ve gone into hyperbole or however that’s spelled. Note to self, find out how it’s spelled before posting.

But yeah, Complete death. It makes me want to post and yet I know that it’s courting everything I hate because I just don’t have the right words when every word means something it’s not. I can’t say anything cause the sharks have come and any movement is an acceptance of some hurt, a finger that points, that this pain, this horrible pain is deserved even asked for even though that’s never what I feel people in the later comment areas that I have muddled through want to say (I didn’t touch the original post figuring it was dumb and probably more choked and deathly to my particular quirk).

I can’t speak in that sea so I stay as quiet as I can but I want to express just this piece of me without any of those charged words. Here, in my area of the net. I want to point to this poison I want to say in my small voice that I don’t like that the conversation dies. I’ve never liked it. I don’t want to spread the fear or pain but… but… opens hands. I don’t know.

Meh. Sorry about this. I just don’t want to write post after post that I never actually post.

Well, that was interesting… see first I got sick. Really sick, I spent all day sleeping on Wednesday and it’s still making me cough today. But thankfully I’ve got it on the run and feel pretty good. Now being all sick and messed up my hours were even weirder then normal…

I ended up catching a robot using my old wordpress image uploader to send txt files to my tmp folder on ghostcircles. I noticed it because in the wordpress admin control the image uploader was pointing to a completely different folder then it usually does. So, I freaked out. Cause wow, not good. I reset the upload folder and my password and spent the rest of the day wondering what was going on… then I checked my email and “hello” bounced back spam originating from my webserver using my email address.

See this happened before like um… 6 months ago and I was all “OMG who got my email address and spamed the crap out of people??” And damn it it’s all coming back to me. This is when I learned that yes indeed there are still people who think they should respond to spam as I got one email that just said “Bitch.” in it. It amused me greatly even though I didn’t send this um… crap. This time I think I cut off the upload in the middle by changing back the upload folder to the normal folder because I only got 260 bounce backs instead of 1200. Whee.

I was using the old version of the “iimage-browser-plugin” for wordpress from 2005 so if any of you are still running that you might try seeing if there’s a new version that DOESN’T allow you to set you upload folder to the very top area of you website. Cause yeah security risk and such. Also the newer versions of wordpress have a pretty nice built in image uploader that is much more secure. You’ll need a newer browser to use it like firefox but hey it’s free and stuff.

So yeah, I upgrade to the newest version of wordpress which was incredibly easy. Smoothest 10 version upgrade I’ve ever done. I still need to update my poor site design though. I’d like to put in a shopping cart system to buy prints and comics and stuff and I’d like to put my comics up which I could do with Comicpress but I’d like to keep my journal as well… and that just seems to be one too many things to fit into one site. =/

I’m just going to have to find sometime to really think about how to cram all of that stuff in there and still make it easy to look at and buy things. I mean I have enough room I could set up a shop as a stand alone but it’d be nice to have it all be one site.

So, I’m definitely going to A-kon this year. Which will be interesting. I plan to take many photos of people in strange outfits… I’m not even talking costumes I just like it when they dress up for the cons. Sometimes it’s unintentionally hilarious. I take photos of lots of people in awkward fitting clothing, mostly pants cause the pants people are selling to chicks now-a-days are terrible to the feminine shape and make us mostly look weird and terrible. I need to draw some from all those photos I took at last year’s A-kon, I really want to get down the horrible shape of the muffin-top because my brain refuses to let me draw it due to the fact that it doesn’t think it looks right at all. So photos have to be taken cause the muffin-top can make even thin anorexic girls look lumpy and fat. It’s not right. =/

I’ll be in the Komik Market at A-kon on May 30th through June 1st. I’ll be at the Bassanimation table though I think it’ll be under a different name since we’re sharing the table with… Steven the guy that ran the Komik Market for the last few years. So I’m not sure what name it’ll be under. I figure I’ll mostly be hanging out at the con and helping Shawnna sell buttons. Hopefully there’ll be room behind the table but that’d be okay… that way I might roam the con a bit and see if I can find some of the people I want to see. It’d be nice to actually see people for once.

Speaking of seeing people at A-kon two years ago I got to see the lovely Shirotsuki and we traded sketches. This was the image I drew for her of her tree guy, Cure. She’s suppose to be at A-kon again this year and hopefully unlike last year where I didn’t see her at all maybe I can get out and bother her. =]

Other Conventions I’m going to be at this year:

A-kon in Dallas… May 30th - June 1st
Anthro-con in Pittsburgh… June 26-29
Comic Con in San Diego… July 24-27

That’s all of them that I can think of.

Part of the prize things I did for the winners of my Saiko and Lavender Contest. The winner of the art part of the contest asked me to draw Satan from Saiko and Lavender. I gave him a tie. =D

Taxes are finished… though I still have to sign the forms and mail them off. Whew!

I know, I always say this but this year I’m going to keep better track of my crap so tax time won’t be hell on earth. =X Sadly, I just know I’ll end up slacking and be pondering what the hell I made at San Diego Comic Con again next year cause I forgot to write that one super important number down… or something. Honestly, I just need to be better organized. On the other hand I actually cleaned my room and now I’ve found most of the things I was looking for so I could move forward on projects. Yay!

Also an image of the kid that I made to reply to a comment in the last LJ post… and also because I found my inking pens and I wanted to see how much work I’d need to do to get back into the swing of things. It looks like inking won’t be too hard to get back into I just need to draw the characters a little bit to figure what the hell I was doing with them. Sigh.

“Never put off to Tomorrow what you can put off for months and months… and months and months and months… ect. ” It’s not artist block, honestly it’s more like stupidity. =/ Smacks self in the boob. But here’s a small update on where I am.

But yay! I found my inking pens while searching my room for tax info. Now I can get started again on the inking and maybe the comicing and the tearing of hair and the wailing and flailing… Ah, well at least there’s the job and the money and the… shit, I still want to get back to the comics. =/

Half of this page is still at base inking levels. Which is where I lay down the lines without any weights. It looks a bit odd this way and I always think it’ll look like crap when I do this but then I put down the final lines and it looks fine. Sighhhhh.

But first taxes, then estimated tax payments, and then the paying job of money to pay for the taxes and then maybe the limping comic bear trap. =[

Sometimes I really wish I knew what I was doing on Wordpress instead of just fucking around with the code and reverse engineering the shit that I need. On the other hand I’m a really accomplished hack and I have good design sense. =/ Still, I wish I know what I was doing. Does anyone have any tips to actually learning CSS or PHP? Cause right now the net and my webdesign books are my main friends and it seems a little silly. Maybe I should go take some classes so I don’t feel quit so shaky on the basics. =/

On the other other hand it is an awesome intellectual challenge. Smirks.