Got my grades back…
And I am now officially graduated from Michigan State University. I finally fucking did it!
Because a fuzzy army of plushies seems less scary! :p
PlushSuits built by Midori8
I’m on the very left! You can barely see me :P
Shut down the skaia.net imageboard?
I’ve been thinking about the Skaia.net image board and debating whether to shut it down, on the following merits:
- The reputation for comments - Now, I would say that most of this has been alleviated by moving to Disqus (by removing anonymous commenting), but it’s not going to bring back people or artists that dislike the site for what has happened in the past.
- Terrible board software - To save time, I chose Shimmie instead of Danbooru for the software to run the board. This makes it near impossible to moderate or delegate any administration tasks to, and is very difficult to extend. Migrating is a very remote option but one I simply don’t have time for.
- Dupes - The dupe count is getting out of hand (I have 440 reports sitting in my inbox right now) and Shimmie offers no simple way to deal with these. It’s more complicated than picking a better image and deleting the dupe, because comments, tags, sources, and other things need to be merged together.
- Lack of in-depth administration - I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t done a good job involving myself with the content on the board. I’ve always immediately replied to non-dupe image reports, but quality can suffer and if people don’t report an image I tend not to glance at the board often enough to handle it. Also, due to the inflexibility of the board software, I can’t make anyone else a ‘moderator’ that is capable of handling images without also allowing them to change anything in the board’s configuration, which is dangerous.
Now, I still feel the imageboard has a few redeeming qualities, such as likely being one of the largest sources for finding Homestuck related art, with somewhere around 40,000 entries. Given the spread of where people post art, the board makes it easy with stuff like searching by tag, and I will say there are good, constructive users on the board and in IRC that do a good job posting. According to Google Analytics, the board gets about 75,000 pageviews a day. I am still a big fan of the MSPA community, especially the creatively inclined, but I don’t want to hurt it by continuing to provide this service either, which is what I’m afraid is happening.
So I’m asking for your opinions. Everyone in the community, whether you even visit the board or not, if you’re an artist or just a fan. Please reblog this into the Homestuck community so people can read it, and reply to this original post via Disqus (or notes) so I can converse with you on it. I want to know how people feel about the board and if they think it should be shut down or not. Thanks.
AMA
I haven’t been posting to Tumblr a lot, but seeing that it’s getting more popular with my friends (over people who I’ve just been following here anyway) I figured I’d point out that my Box of Askingness is open, and I’m curious if people ever have questions for me, since I see others with them!
If you just like asking questions, I’m happy to answer whatever, but here’s some topics I’m good at:
- Spottycats (incl. me)
- Computers, programming, the interwebs, etc.
- Skaianet (since there are a lot of MSPA peeps on Tumblr)
- Whatever
And if for some weird reason you’re reading this on Tumblr but don’t like Tumblr’s ask system, I also have a Formspring.
Since this blog is about, well, me, I thought I’d write a little about a new character that I designed, and some of the reasoning behind it.
To start, AndrewNeo (the cheetah) has been my first and primary identity as long as I’ve been a furry, for over 10 years now. Unfortunately, it has the coincidence of me being young and uncreative at the time, so I used my real first name as part of the character’s. This has had the consequence of me using the name as a regular identity on the internet (which is fine) except now it’s hard to seperate the character from the name.
So to get away from this I decided I’d need a new character. I can ‘exist’ on the web as AndrewNeo, especially in places where it’s hard or impossible to change your name (like here, FA, etc.) and just start roleplaying as a new identity.
So, this new identity is Kauko. Since I’m still awfully fond of spottycats, it is a king cheetah - a variation I’ve liked for a long time, but I have a problem with changing primary features of AndrewNeo.
Kauko has a couple important things to it - first, is the ability to ‘shapeshift’, but in its case, not on its own will but through an external input. The backstory I’ve come up with puts it as a ‘rapid genetic prototype’ and the character can be sort of seen as a form of artificial entity, despite being fully organic. Using this external input (seen as the RFID antenna on the back of its neck) with another device, the genetic code can be changed to anything with in limits, allowing changes.
Another part of this is something I’ve come to more of a revelation recently, which is the lack of a primary gender identity. Without getting into anything too personal (in this post at least) I’ve made Kauko neuter (much like my plush suit, which is part of where my influence for this area comes from) but with the ability to have genders changed like its form. In this neuter form I use the pronoun ‘it’, but I may choose something different in the future, since there are several other pronouns that could be used.
Overall I’m really happy with this ref sheet that Farore did for me, I wanted to make sure to have one this time before I started playing the character. It is likely I’ll start to assume Kauko in different places, but it’s another step to get to in the future. In all reality it will be impossible to phase out AndrewNeo as a character, I still like him, and there is too much art not to!
Happy belated birthday to Solatrus who commissioned a jingle with a kind pledge to my SXSW fundraiser. I asked him what he wanted the song to be about on his birthday, and when he didn’t have anything in mind I made him not one but TWO birthday jingles. This is the boy’s version which is called “You Are the Birthday Boy” and there’s also a girl’s version called “You Are the Birthday Girl”. Sing along with it and say your friend’s name at the end!
Feel free to download both songs, sing them at parties, and re-record them for whatever purposes you like because fuck the guy who has the copyright on “Happy Birthday to You” and all the people he screws over when they want to make a movie with a birthday scene in it. This song is way better.
How did I miss this! Also, late happy bday Jere :3
pffffffffffffffffahahahahahahahaha
absolutely
oh
my
god
Oh my god this is terrible but I kind of lost my shit ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I’m not sure it would be possible not to reblog this.
….
What NAS said.
russwalshsfptz asked: Hey bro, Jeremy sent me over here to ask some questions. I'm Russ Walsh, a co-host of the podcast Pesterchum Radio that's done a couple of stream over on Skaianet Radio, and I was just wondering if skaianet still had streaming capability. The site doesn't look like it's seen a lot of activity lately and I'm concerned it may be currently out of commission. Hopefully you can respond soon. Thanks, bye.
Jeremy still runs Radio stuff, so it’s up to him if anything actually runs or not, but the server is still has the streaming software running so there’s no reason we can’t.
