It seemed fun to do, so I did it! Will change back to my normal icons once June is over. Or earlier, in case I get really tired of being blinded by my own gallery's overload of colour.

I also got an extag for all OCs who received an icon 👀

Wow, DeviantART is really hard

It used to be my main site until like 2017, when TH became my main. But because of the small community on here, I am sorta lacking feedback. Wanted to go back to dA and finish my backlog, but dear lord is the site outdated and really not user friendly.

The funny thing is that dA restricts tools that would increase its userbase's interaction with the site. Speaking of schedule, of course.

Scheduling posts is a brilliant system in which you type all your info to the picture and let it post whenever you wish. Helps me deal with the anxiety of clicking post by taking the action outta my hands! Not to mention that people can post more art in general that way, by scheduling it all at one point. That way they can spend more time browsing the site, meaning more ad displays, and of course an upload is also more ad displays for dA as well.

But of course, the geniuses put it behind Core. You have to pay them to increase your own time on the site. What clown came up with that business model?

Plus, group admin tools are so limited. We still get all join requests double half of the time, we still can't see if something is in already, we still can't look up specific members, the only decent thing is the log. It hurts so much to go through and the system really isn't working in our favour to create a well functioning group Dl

Regardless, I still like my watchers there, and get a ton of feedback there in general, so I'm gonna try to manually get back there! Starting by clearing my feedback backlog. I've been at 100+ feedback messages for over a year now, and that's such a painful mental block to look at that I'd rather avoid the site.

Anyway, I'm doing a feature event in my OC group that can get an OC of yours or a friend's featured in front of a good 17k watchers, check it out if you use dA

Hey y'all!

Ended up going with the faction-based gallery, partially based on popular vote, partially because I liked the potential it has.

And it's finished! You should check out how my character gallery looks right now, because I'm actually quite happy with it! It's going to take ages for me to get used to, but this is a far better way of showcasing my stories and all than I previously had. Now all that directory work I did is directly shoved into people's eyes and I can only hope that those among us who enjoy reading more than looking will stumble right into the archival evidence of my listmaking addiction.

Hey y'all! 

Let's keep things short and make this a bullet point journal

• My current folders are based on species
• Because I have so many demons and the other species are quite diverse, species-based folders are kinda obsolete
• Not to mention that my tag list is linked everywhere, so people can browse by species like that easy
  
  
• Option 1: change my folders to the factions detailed in my directory
  • Pros: 
    • more relevant to my stories and world than species
    • I can finally order my characters properly according to relevance
    • I can add blurbs to the the factions, explaining my OCs' situations better
    • I can link my directory at the start of every faction for better browsing
    • makes my world feel more well-rounded and present in my characters
  • Cons: 
    • not very useful to other people since they don't immediately get what's going on and it requires reading
    • I need a global "characters" folder so that I can display factions in a nested folder way (this won't be a con anymore with my next bulletin's question, just you see)
    • I am Scared Of Change
    • the Independent "faction" isn't a faction and is actually very large and can get confusing
    • my characters will no longer look varied, because the first 40-ish characters in the gallery will all be demons before a non-demon shows up. this isn't the case in my current order
      
      
• Option 2: keep my folders the way they are
  • Pros: 
    • easier and more useful to people browsing my characters
    • less confusing to people, especially people who click away the second they feel like they'll have to work to understand my OCs
    • by sorting my OCs by most images, the OCs who are my darlings and are close to my heart will be more viewed by people. this will be lost when sorting by faction
    • character species are mixed, since my characters with the most images are from various species and factions, so my gallery doesn't feel as stale and overdone 
  • Cons: 
    • no custom character sorting
    • I have bad taste™ so less desired characters show up first
    • I just have too many demons, man

I'd love to hear which one people prefer, and any possible additional comments would help! I'll probably make a decision on my own, but it helps to know what people find easy and any additional pros and cons I may not have seen <:

(Next bulletin will ask you if I should keep my worldbuilding info on Elithian, or if I should transfer it over here, but that's for next time)

This title makes it sound like I'm dropping some sick callout on y'all's heads

Hey y'all!

I will be participating in ArtFight 2019 and thought I'd plan a little better ahead this time!  First off, I'm also ElithianFox on there, feel free to follow me.

I'll be going on vacation in early July (I think the 4th? 5th?) and won't be back until the 15th, so I wanna make sure that the first few days of July I spend drawing attacks. If the site is as messy on launch as it was last year, however, my chances of being able to fetch references will be really slim and I won't be able to do any art those first few days. I can't just go saving my bookmarked characters' references to my PC because I won't know for sure if the artist will be participating or not, and I don't know if you can attack people without a team.

So, I'd love your help! If you're participating this year, can you comment your AF account? That way I can bookmark and save characters and have all references I need on my PC so that the site not loading can't be an issue at launch. I do participate in friendly fires, so we won't have to worry about any team stuff.

Also, know that I love demon characters! If you've got any in the same vein as mine, there's a good 100% chance I'll draw 'em.

Hey y'all!

If you're watching my uploaded art, you've probably seen that I added a couple of pieces explaining the anatomical quirks of some characters. So let's add a few words of extra explanation to them!

You may have noticed that all of these cases include a situation where something gets duplicated and placed right behind the section that was duplicated. For Beast, it's his entire tibia-fibula-knee complex that gets its inverted placement behind the first knee as well as part of his head, for Naceus it's his neck vertebrae that repeat not once but twice, giving him a really disgusting bendy neck, and for four armed characters it's their arms as well as the part of the ribcage and the spinal vertebrae. These changes are based on the homeobox, otherwise known as the hox genes, which decide animals' body plan and which sets us apart from plants, fungi, and micro-organisms and sets our body plan in stone. Also the reason we can't just branch out like plants can! 

In my characters' cases, segments don't get duplicated entirely, often only duplicating segments from their start and stopping somewhere midway.

So, keeping that in the back of your mind, here's some fun facts about Livian duplication and other anatomy showcased!

• Many magical creatures or magically altered natural creatures are susceptible to this duplication. It's why Mirrors have four arms.
• Not just the bone structure, but also the internal organs, muscles, skin, etc. are duplicated. The reason so many magical creatures die out is because these do not always seamlessly connect. The worst case is for four armed creatures, who have the start of their lungs twice and who often have breathing issues. For Beast, the muscles of his secondary lower legs are mirrored by inversion, causing issues with running.
• Besides the tendency of duplication, it's very common for outer extremities to disappear. Creatures like Mirrors, familiars, Beast, Elsae Ardu, etc. are missing fingers, and the tail of Mirrors misses the characteristic pointed tail tip because of this.
• All of the creatures affected by this who reproduce sexually have eventually lost several of the excess features of their duplication, like the second pair of collarbones on four armed creatures, the extra ribs that overlap their second sternum, and the muscle structures connecting everything. Still, many of these suffer from some pretty bad health issues at greater ages.
• Usually duplication happens outside the head area. Beast's elongated skull is the reason why he was so hard to create; his brain was duplicated as well, and just throwing random extra brain mass into the mix can't possibly be viable without going through thousands of adjustments. His creators had no idea how to keep his skull from being duplicated during the process, so they had to work around it if they wanted him to be viable. Eventually, his brain became the same size as a regular demon's and they were successful in adding extra cartilage into his skull to avoid issues.
• Duplication is one of the reasons why creating viable creatures is so hard. It's truly a testament to skill and knowledge that demons are perfectly human when it comes to the number and location of body parts they have.

For reference, the anatomical elements referred to:

So what if I made Cefalian's surname Michaelis and Lewis' surname Menten

Because I am exactly that type of bastard who would adhere to such dumb little naming jokes and that's one of the funniest things I can possibly do to their names. After all, I'd been looking for surnames for them for so long now

What do you mean it's not funny at all

Hey y'all!

This is kinda older news, but I don't recall having announced it yet. I decided to spend some time making the Livian script! 

It's the characters most northern demon nations use to write, bar a few that use either a modified script or something of their own. It's based around a few ancient scripts we have here on earth, people who're busy with lettering and stuff will probably recognise which. It's also prone to some changes, since there's no Y and Q atm but that makes stuff a little difficult. We'll see! Ended up adding them anyway! 

You can download and install it here.

Here's what I've got so far

It looks pretty stylish in a text

And it adds up great when writing out so of my characters' names!

Do we even have a term to distinguish character profiles from my own frontpage profile?

Hey y'all!

Decided to go with a final profile change. Because while the other one worked, I like this one's compactness more. Plus, Vom is an absolute code god. It's always nice working with one of their diverse codes. I'm pretty satisfied with both my character and my user profile layouts, so I expect to keep them like that!

Hey y'all!

I may have found the solution to my issue of my profiles being too long: code that adds clickable boxes without changing the URL!

So, very quick poll: which one do you prefer for long profiles? For the shorter ones, I will be using the full version, but for the longer ones I am still on the fence. Having everything be compact helps the gallery stand out more and prevents people from being overtaken by details, but on the other hand you don't have all info on one large page where you don't need to click to get it all. So please lemme know what you think!

Second, I will finally be replying to my huge backlog. I've been super tired and have been studying for my finals for 2 months now, but they're almost done and my last one on the 28th is a light one so I'll have the energy to reply and all!