Commission these folks! ( creepazoid favorite

It's always great when you can get art that respects your characters or ideas, and it's even better when you can get that art by supporting artists who could use the work/money.

Here's a list of people I happen to know who need commission work about now...
-- Very capable of capturing the look and personality of characters. She's currently VERY in need of the commission work, so she's at the top of my list for you to consider, please. She also has very good turnaround time.

-- New to the land of commission work and, though currently not very well known, is certainly a serious artist type. Give him his start?

-- Extremely talented artist, very respectful of characters' designs and personality, and always a treat to get art from. She just moved and is on the jobhunt, so commissions right now are basically paying for her internet fees (and some other bills).




Okay, next order of business... I've decided I need a new policy regarding thanking people on deviantART.

In the past, I have always made it a point to thank each person for a +fav/collect or +watch/friend on their user page, or to respond to each comment every time they make one (excepting those made by close buddies who know I'm very grateful regardless). In years past, this wasn't a big deal. But nowadays, it appears my gallery's attention-getting has upped its rate of frequency a little bit. I now get at least a couple favs or watches per a day, though rarely any comments other than those from my most faithful watchers and close buddies.

The thing is, I'd still keep thanking each and every person for each and every bit of recognition or commentary they gave my work, except there's a new phenomenon involved in this higher-frequency-faving/watching...

Blank users.

Okay, don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm ungrateful for the favs or the watches. Nor am I one of the people out there who gets pissy if someone +favs but doesn't comment. I mean, hey, I do that too.

It's just that sometimes it seems a bit suspicious when certain pieces in my gallery always get +favs from users who have NO deviations in their own gallery, NO journals on their page, NO comments on their activity log, no activity at all! They just...collect favorites. Typically, the most frequent victims of this sort of thing are pieces such as Only Ella With Her Clothes Off or Pirate That Gypsy -- which seem to attract Blank Users who collect mostly furry girls, fetish or pervy artwork. However, lately, Kabur Reference has also fallen victim to odd Blank Users of both the pervy-collecting type and the just plain weird type, and my fashion designs have frequently received the "reference collect" sort of Blank User attention.

Sometimes these Blank Users appear to be collecting "reference" type images, the sort that I have seen people prone to theft go for in the past. Sometimes they're trying to pass it off as their own art, or copy the ideas out of it for their own art. Furthermore, seeing deal with so many art and character thieves over the years has given me plenty of examples of reasons to be paranoid about people who MIGHT take art and use it to represent "their" characters at other sites, usually for things like RPGs or such. I'm not saying Blank Users who +fav my work are thieves or anything. I'm just saying...um...suspicious behavior ahoy?

I have no problem with the idea that some people on deviantART are not artists/writers/creator types, and maybe they just want to collect the pretty things they like to look at best. But there are plenty of people of that variety who do so and also leave the occasional comment, or make a journal just to blab about their life or something. They don't silently, creepily collect artwork and yet never leave a single word ANYWHERE on the site for years, even in response to people dropping by their page to say thanks for the +favs.

That's the other thing...these are NOT new users! These are accounts active for quite a while, collecting for quite a while, being WEIRD BLANK USERS for quite a while.

Seriously. It bothers me. And yes, it also bothers me when people who AREN'T blank users collect my images for their Nothing AT ALL But Pervy Fetish Porn Girls favorites dump. Sure, I drew female figures. Sure, I drew females wearing less clothing than the typical American would sensibly wear in modern day public. But I WASN'T DRAWING IT FOR YOU TO JACK OFF TO.

So here's my new policy.

I'm not thanking people who collect my work for favorites collections that are nothing but perversion and sexual obsession, furry girls or no. I'm not discriminating against fetish art or furries, I just don't like being associated with sexual-thoughts-obsessed types (let's face it, there's a pretty high rate of those types turning out to be creepazoids you'd worry about in your neighborhood if you had daughters or just kids at all). I think sex and sexuality is a legitimate artistic topic, and I think sexuality can be a lovely aesthetic without being perverted. I think furries and/or anthropomorphism are also a legitimate artistic topic, as well as a hobby interest and sometimes a culture that are deserving of open-mindedness and respect. (If you ever saw that CSI Las Vegas episode about "yiffing" and decided that's all furries were about, you're ill-informed and need to debunk that prejudice.)

I'm not thanking people who collect my work for favorites collections but have no other recognizable life signs on their accounts. It's creepy, suspicious, and I'm adding the names to a list from now on of users to be suspicious of.

I'm not thanking watchers who fall into the above two categories either.

If users appear to have some variety to their collections, or some life-sign other than favorites-collecting, I will thank them.

And if this sort of thing continues for too long and keeps bugging me internally the way it does, if I can't get past it and stop gritting my teeth at perverts, I'm just going to have to delete those deviations because clearly they attract attention that I am not comfortable with.

Meanwhile, checking out those Blank Users with the perversion-crammed favorites collections has also led me to several deviants who need to be reported for posting straight up pornography.

One sad thing about the open and immediate nature of the internet is the negation of a sense of responsibility to our youth. The internet and media at large have become progressively less and less concerned about what they expose to a young audience, how the things they project into the world form that young audience's minds. I don't believe in censorship, but I believe in taking some responsibility for what you leave out in the open to affect children, even other people's children. Parents can try to shield their kids' eyes and minds from all of it with extreme ferocity and still be fighting a losing battle simply because, short of locking their kid up in a room with no contact to the outside world, they cannot stop mass media and the world those kids now live in.

It's just a shame that these days, so many people don't stop to think "there are probably young kids going to see this on the site because the internet is open access and there is no age verification process..." and stop THEMSELVES from leaving things out for the young to find. Time was when it wasn't necessary for an authority figure, whether local administration or federal law, to whoop up on people's asses just for them to do the right thing.

Free and public perversion is different than free and public appreciation of the human nude as well, people, so don't even think that's my hypocrisy. Free and public perversion begets desensitizing to perversion, desensitizing to sexual objectification, and that begets creepazoids and sexual predatory behavior.

If we had some magical wand to wave to banish perversion but encourage appreciation of the AESTHETIC of the human figure WITHOUT sexual connotation, I imagine the rate of sexual crimes might drastically drop. We might also have a lower rate of "hate thy body" syndromes, a better rate of self-esteem.

And I might not want to yell at complete strangers on the internet about all of this in a journal on a public art gallery website.