Just remember: it's going to be okay. =) Things may seem bleak, things may kind of suck right now, but... take a deep breath and hug your tail. It's going to work out. It's going to get better. There are awesome people out there making a difference. Be one of those people.

I had a weird dream last night that I decided to just up and move to Hawaii, but when I got to Hawaii it was a nightmare. All the houses were replaced by factories that made fruit-based drinks and everybody was forced to live on the beaches. People were burrowing into the ground and sleeping under the beach sand, some living on a handful of beach chairs that they'd turned into a rag-tag homes.

The people would come out at night to sell cheap hand made candles and decorated clam shells to tourists. Except there were next to no tourists.

Everybody was poor, and everybody had this notion that all the tourists were on the next island over. They'd try to swim to nearby islands with their weird candle-based merchandise to find tourists... but few made it due to an explosive outbreak of ravenous sharks (yes, an outbreak).

Despite this being a dream, I have now decided this is how Hawaii's entire economy is wired. People hawking candles to tourists and swimming from island to island, risking life and limb, to sell kitsch to tourists while surviving in an economy solely based on fruit drinks.

Wanta Fanta?

Rwar. I've been diagnosed with sleep apnea, and I've started to develop a rather nasty case where I can't sleep at night. Each morning I wake up groggy, feeling drained and only through the sheer power of caffeine (coffee be praised!) can I stay awake. My insurance isn't covering the majority of the machine, so I'm tossing up some of my prized shinies on eBay to help pay for them.

Xbox One Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Limited Edition + 12 Games
http://www.ebay.com/itm/15219592964.....84.m1555.l2649

Gaming Heads' Portal Turret Statue (Exclusive Edition)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/15219593262.....84.m1555.l2649

Just a note - I know a lot of users out there are still having issues getting back into their accounts, and I'm pretty much working around the clock to help every last person get back into their account (and responding to concerns and emails as I can). Ther eis a bit of a backlog, but we've got multiple admins working on it.

I was able to handle over 1,000+ inquiries last night, and I'm burning the midnight oil trying to get everyone back into the account (I quite literally didn't get to bed until 10AM, and even cancelled a dentist appointment). I'll also be cancelling all Memorial Day plans to keep working on emails until we get a response to every last person.

Why are there so many emails?

For a lot of people, they've had accounts for 10+ years, gone through multiple emails and didn't update them. Or, in the old system, it didn't verify if there were typos or if the email was properly formatted. Others had .edu accounts, and once they left school the emails were gone.

But our goal is to get everyone back into their accounts, and by the power of Red Bull and the Sword of Omen... it will be done.

I know things are rough right now, but we're working around the clock (quite literally) to make security improvements and get everything up to par. I can't excuse what lead up to the issue, but I can state that we are working to make things right and do our damnedest to fix the problems.

On that note, we'll have more information to share on our new code platform (yes, it's actually happening) in the future.

- Dragoneer

Been working on getting back into my productive groove and getting things taken care of. I know I've been in something of a rut lately, but as of tomorrow, I'm back in production full time. Just wanted to give a shout out of thanks to everything who's been supportive and incredible awesome (not to mention patient!).

You're all seriously awesome.

KitsuneKit is doing a growth drive to raise money, and is using me as a willing test subject. Help KitsuneKit make some cash... and help me grow to ridiculous proportions. Kaijuneer is happy Neer.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/19576062/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/19638841/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/19638879/

I really didn't want to address this publicly, and wanted to keep our personal affairs both personal and private. Unfortunately, a few malicious individuals who found out about this decided to start spreading rumors, going to our friends behind our backs and discussing our private info... and the rumors have spread, and some of the things I'm hearing are as far from the truth could possibly be.

Sciggles and I have separated. It's hard to say that openly and publicly but it is what it is. Sciggles and I have drifted apart somewhat, and our directions and life goals have taken us down different paths. Our separation is a mutual one. Sciggles and I are still best friends, and I consider her one of the closest people in my life. There is nothing devious or malicious between us and we both have nothing but respect and love for each other and want nothing but the best. We are still a strong team and have no plans on stopping that.

Again, I wanted to keep my personal life just that — personal. Sciggles is one of the best things to ever have happened in my life, and I don't regret a single day that's gone by with her in my life.

Just a note - for those waiting on art/commissions from me I'd recently hit a few delays which pushed back my ability to get work done. If you want a refund due to the delays feel free to shoot me a note, else I'll be reaching out to your guys to try to schedule time for some one-on-ones and hammer things out.

I'm trying to get everything squared away, but I ran into some life issues which crept up, preventing me from getting work done on the timeline I'd wanted. Starting sometime this coming week I'll be arting nightly once again, and returning to streaming on a semi-regular basis.

EDIT: And to be open, I suffer bipolar depression. I don't always openly discuss it, but I've decided to stop burying the fact. I've been stuck in a depressive rut for some time now and not been able to get my creative juices/mojo flowing, which led to a creative downward spiral for a while now. I've started some new medication which has helped me quite a bit in the short time I've been on it. So I'm trying to focus on what's important to be me - FA and art.

Spotify raised $1 billion in convertible debt from TPG, Dragoneer, and clients of Goldman Sachs, as first reported by Wall Street Journal’s Douglas MacMillan. By raising debt rather than equity, it doesn’t have to worry about poor signaling from a down-round raised at a lower valuation than the $8.5 billion it set in June 2015.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/st.....ith-the-devil/

For the record, I would like to make it clear I am not a billionaire. Or a millionaire. I'm barely even a dollarmenuaire. Although, I can't wait for speculations of "Dragoneer stole billions from FA onations and invested it into Spotify." And if I did that, I can assure you Spotify would ONLY play Caravan Palace and Aquabats tracks 24/7.

I want to see Zootopia again. And again. And again. And again...

Why is it so good? It's just perfect. I just... I want to eat up everything with that world.

Going over Beta Feedback, the updates for next week will include, but are not limited to:
1) Comments - Further revisions to comments (adjusting spacing, formatting ever so slightly and removing the admin "stripe" pattern as some users have mentioned it's hard to read, especially those with dyslexia).
2) UserpageFurther userpage refinements (adjusting gallery and profiles)
3) Mobile/Tablet - Fixing mobile and tablet layouts (including flagging the site to respect the "Desktop Preffered" option on mobile browsers). Especially problematic given tablets show the mobile view, which wasn't intended. Fix has been identified, and is in testing. Just need to do some basic tweaks.
4) Submission - Submission view revisions, as well as adding in placeholders for submission options (so users can show what software they used, hardware, etc to create their content).
5) Links - Additional improvements to make links/nav more visible.
6) Nav Bar - See if we can make the sticky navbar a toggle (some users have describe it as "creepy" and "terrifying" and like an annoying friend who just won't leave you alone -- perhaps the best feedback I've ever gotten anything. Ever.).
7) Spoilers - See if we can a "Spoiler" BBCode integrated so people can discuss Game of Thrones without killing one another.
8) Visuals Re-implementing rounded borders for all containers (so uses will be less likely to cut themselves on the sharp edges -- they were removed temporarily while other interface tweaks were fixed).
9) Other - Continuing other tweaks, fixes, consistency checks.
10) Themes - Finish the themes. The unexpected downtime unfortunately ate into my time to finish the themes by the end of this week as I had planned.
11) Core Values - See Zootopia at least two more times.

There's been a lot of great feedback so far, and it's helping. =)

Update: A lot of users have asked why this is just a UI, and not code. Code changes ARE in the works as well. The UI is my pet project, and what I'm working on and have been working on/off the past year plus.

Update 2: Added an item (Themes).

On a scale of 1 to 10, Zootopia was a freakin' 11. Hands down. Seriously, seriously good. And Clawhauser? Best Disney princess of ALL TIME!

Just wanted to give an update on what happened last night.

We've been making a lot of tweaks and improvements on our systems' back end to support higher resolution uploads and lift the file data cap (which will help musicians). We've been migrating over the site's assets to a new server, and were planning on switching to the new system (a 48TB file storage system) some time today.

While moving the data over AND having site live we experienced an issue with file system that caused the system to become unresponsive while under the added load. My assumption is one of the drives in the system started experiencing a fault, but wasn't reporting it. The drive kept trying to recover, and while the system waited for it to eventually become responsive, eventually it timed out.

This caused the server itself to become unresponsive, and I had to drive out to the colo facility and reset it. This was an older server (one of our last) without dedicated remote management, so it compounded things a bit. Trying to reboot the server remotely caused FreeBSD to become unresponsive due to the hardware issue.

Our plan was to move the data over, then retrofit the older server with higher capacity drives to act as an updated mirror. I got home at 10am this morning and crashed on the spot.

Thanks to  graeth for showing me this. It's amazing.

Pacific Rim 2 was finally, officially announced... and this makes me squee with all sorts of stupid, reckless abandon. I'm really hoping the sequel surpasses all expectations and goes on to spawn a ton of "me too" movies and back the kaiju/mecha movie genre in force.

And... that I hope more Otachi appear in the sequel. Otachi has become my waifu. I quite literally *squee* every time I see Otachi pictures.

http://i.imgur.com/XiaVZLF.jpg (Dev Beta)
https://i.imgur.com/4kv2TDF.jpg (Current Beta for comparison)

Just wanted to share a WIP from the beta. Revised the user page =3 Been working on Beta revisions for the past 72 hours with little to no sleep (I would kill for a Red Bull, OH MY GOD).

Still a lot of work to do as I decided to re-write most of the pages (again) from scratch using Flexboxes (yay). I also completely redid how FA handles thumbnails for the most part (bigger, shinier!). Still many tweaks and improvements needed to go, but overall, some seriously big improvements. For those wondering, we plan on updating the Beta early next week with the changes.

*checks off the "tighten up graphics on level 3" box from his last journal*

The screenshots are kind of washed out due to IMGur's optimizations, but it's all good.

Works pretty well for just about any page, too. =3 Took screenshots of some other pages to test it out.

https://i.imgur.com/pfRk4N8.jpg (Thunper's Gallery)
https://i.imgur.com/XSs9I7p.jpg (Teaselbone's Gallery)

Just giving an update as to the progress of things. I've been going over feedback for the Beta UI, and have been making a metric ton of changes to it. Among some of the issues that will be addressed next beta update:

* iOS compatibility was mostly non-existent. I now have an iPhone for development purposes so I can properly test changes there.

* User links (in comments, profiles, journals, descriptions and notes) didn't stand out enough.

* I'm redoing the entire Control Panel (again) to be more consistent and display better (converting everything to Flexboxes)

* Multiple improvements to the mobile design and navigation.

* More fixes/improvements to user pages based on feedback (placement of things, larger profile and featured submission images).

* Fixing consistency and naming convention of links (e.g. where "select all" buttons are, the naming system of Prev/Next -vs- Older/Newer)

* Tightened up the graphics on level 3.

* General other improvements, fixes and changes to both desktop and mobile layouts to be more consistent across the board.

Hoping to have the next update to Beta go live by next Monday, which should clear up a lot of the problems people were having with it. As usual, if you have feedback or suggestions, you can leave them here or open a "User Interface" ticket for further feedback. =3

Was reading a post on Reddit that reminded me of an an incident long ago.

Way back in the long, long ago, in the before time, I decided to go for a long walk around Allentown, PA because I had nothing better to do and needed to meander. About an hour or so into the walk a cop car pulled over, and the officer inside flagged me down.

The conversation went something like this:
Cop: "We've had reports of a 'suspicious figure' walking through the town. Everything alright? What are you doing out here?"
Me: "Everything's fine, yeah. Just decided to go for a walk because I can't fall asleep, needed to unwind."
Cop: "It's 2:00am. Why were you walking down the side of the street?"
Me: "There's no sidewalks anywhere. Where else am I supposed to walk?" *
Cop: "Uh... fair point. Well, look, we've had a few reports from some concerned individuals, and I can't let you walk on the side of the street. We keep getting calls about you, and people are freaking out. Can I give you a lift somewhere?"

The cop (who was totally awesome, by the by) drove me home. Apparently, there were several phone calls made because people were seriously freaking out about me walking. I was literally doing nothing else at the time than walking down the side of the road. I wasn't singing, wasn't blaring out "Roxanne" in a spot-on impression of Eddie Murphy's hyena-like serenade. Given this was post 9/11, and part of me imagines some paranoid lil' ol' lady in one of the many tiny burgs I walked through was up late, had their infomercials interrupted by the sound of somebody walking on gravel on the side of the road, went to look out the window... and screaming out to their husband in abject fear, "MARTY! THERE'S ANOTHER FAT TERRORIST WALKING DOWN THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AGAIN! CALL PRESIDENT BUSH!"

* Seriously, there's little to no sidewalks in a lot of the lil' towns in Pennsylvania. If you don't have a car you're expected to... I dunno, hover. Teleport. Turn into a raven and fly to CVS for some Arizona Ice Tea when you get the craving.

A lot of various sites call themselves by different things. Some call themselves furry, some call themselves anthro. There's really no right or wrong definition as "anthropomorphic" is what the entire fandom (and sub-fandoms) falls under. I've always felt the term "anthro" felt stiff, generic and lacking any intrigue. As if some scientist saw a picture of Renamon and went, "Ahh, yes. Anthropomorphism in at its finest. Look, Jenkins! I believe this is what the historical archives will one day reference as a 'furry'. COME! Witness the spectacle." *

And it's not exactly as if "anthropomorphics" rolls off the tongue.

Then again, "furries" doesn't reflect who we are entirely either. There's therians, otherkin, scalies, avians and pretty much everything in between mixed in there. If you call an alligator a "furry" be prepared to be eaten out of principal. And yet, at the same time, "Furry" is the one term that describes us and defines us much the same way "Brony" has come to describe the MLP:FiM community. The term carries both good and bad behind the name depending on who you ask.

And yet, at the end of the day, this is a furry site... and an anthro site. A site for people to upload furries, bronies, humans, scalies, dragons, transformation, imagination and more**. Titles and definitions become a weird term.

So, curious... do you call yourself a furry? Anthro enthusiast? Otherkin? Hot Pocket spiritualist? Or are you just some dude who thinks all of the above is some weird, odd collective... but damn if you don't like the art?

* Only scientists written by Seth MacFarlane actually speak like this.
** Despite contrary belief, FA has always allowed humans to be uploaded.

I've posted updated versions of our "Convention Survival Guides" to the FAU site, updated and revamped for 2016 with new feedback, tips and suggestions. Have additional suggestions, comments or recommendations? Feel free to share 'em here! I'll take any and all community feedback and work them into the guides if I'm able.

Want to use these guides for your convention? FEEL FREE! Tweak away, and edit them as you see fit to match your con/event! All that we ask is a link back to either Fur Affinity (hi!) or the FAU site at faunited.org.

Attendee Survival Guide
http://www.faunited.org/#!attendee-.....al-guide/swy7c

Dealer Survival Guide
http://www.faunited.org/#!dealer-su.....al-guide/wkm8i

Fursuiter Survival Guide
http://www.faunited.org/#!fursuiter.....al-guide/eau6j