RBW went well. I broke even, including ticket price, travel, food and fresh stock. So hurrah, it more than paid for itself.
That said, I could have done a lot better. I got to talk to some very inspiring and insightful folks while there which brought a few things home to me. So needless to say I have a big list of improvements to make, and need to branch further afield than just the furry fandom.
The first one though will be concentrating on one job at a time. Something I've long had trouble with. But if I want to be a business success I need to stop leaving projects half done and moving onto the next new and shiny thing.

It was also a wonderful confidence boost. People bought sketchbook commissions from me (thank-you twinklestah, xandy, fuzzyskunk, raverfox420, and little-wolf), claws, paw-pads, and even got a few requests for prints of artwork I've previously done, which I'll be getting on to as soon as the new orders and various commissions are all dealt with. :3

With that out of the way though, it was wonderful to see so many friendly faces, both old and new! And it was heartening to see the con under tight and professional control. After last years issues, this time attendance seemed down. However the con staff have rebuilt the event into something really fit for purpose now, and I see next years attendance sky-rocketing by comparison.

I'm saddened to say the con wasn't without mishap, but neither issue that I know of was the fault of or preventable by the staff, and I can only hope the Rossmore Hotel in Ilford (NOT the con hotel) gets a visit from the health inspector soon, and that the troublemaker in the con sees some jail time.

As ever the Erasmus was the loudest boat on the Thames saturday night, and I had my first Martini since I was dressed up as James Bond. I got to crash at the hotel that night so enjoyed mushroom pasta at 2am and an extra few hours of sleep than if I'd had to commute all the way in again in the morning.

I know this is far from exhaustive, but it's what comes to mind at half midnight most easily. You're all ace folks and I'm glad to know you all.

Next up; Confuzzled 2010!

Going to stream again

http://www.livestream.com/starborneworks

From here on I think I'll be using livestream. The prostream software that comes with an account there is vastly less taxing on my system.
Running ManyCam to try and stream my desktop on ustream, and broadcasting it with the flash interface had the CPU usage hitting 100% continually and the tablet lagging badly as a result. Tonights testing had livestream using only 50% of the CPU and no tablet lag. This means listening to music as I go.

I've also been told the output is a lot clearer as it's not being done by flash.

Going to ustream for a bit once I grab a cuppa.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scistarborne

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2891158/

Yessir, AtomicStoney's make a SOCKBABY fan character.

If you don't know who SockBaby is, you need to.

Thought y'all might be interested in something I've knocked together on my new workbench..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV0CJqSSlr4
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQqnllU-s2w

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scistarborne

Will start shortly. Just grabbing a sandwich!

EDIT: Done! http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2833481/

Well, for the most part.

That's all of my scanned and organised images re-uploaded to FA in the main and scraps galleries.

There's still a few somewhere in the old WIP directories that I'll have to fish around for, and quite a LOT of images I've never gotten around to scanning at all. Something I'll try to remedy over the next little while if I get the time. But of course, I'd rather start something new and fresh in most cases. ;)

Got a couple of commissions I want to get going on again, and will once some tax paperwork's out of the way. I've also been given permission by the characters owners to draw.. furry porn!

So from waaaaaaaay over here, I'll quietly say I'm not at all nervous about this and in fact like furry porn so shouldn't be concerned about admitting it and that I might like drawing it too.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scistarborne

May not be a long session, but got something I want to get out of my head. :3

EDIT: And after two hours, I think all the sketchwork for my art-trade with  little-wolf

http://www.sci-fi-fox.com/offsiteli.....olf_sketch.jpg

It got a bit of a mind of it's own, so with fireflys, giant mushrooms, a caterpillar silhouetted by the moon, glowing mushrooms, steampunk lamps and so on, this might take a while to finish. XD

Thankyou to those who came and watched me draw on ustream with my webcam. Two and a bit hours and it flew by. I've not had drawing feel quite so sociable before! Plus the running feedback and help was very much appreciated!

I'll have to do this again next time I'm sketching! :)

Relating to my recent posts of the resin claws I produce:
Regular: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2804119
Glowies: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2808251

Claws are in three sizes; 3, 4 and 5cm long. That's Small, Medium and Long.
They're cast in a polyurethane resin reinforced with calcium carbonate.

Small has a base price of £1, Medium is £1.10 and Long is £1.20.
For stripes add 50p per claw per extra colour.
For glow in the dark add 75p per claw (this premium quality glow powder is expensive. Supply of Green is in stock, other colours will need time to order in)
To have an LED mounted add 50p per claw. Can be clear or translucent. Add 10p extra per for translucent colour (advised, diffuses colour better).
To have glowing striped claws (LED within a striped claw) add £1 per claw. This is still at the experimental stage and fiddly work so my losses are higher.
To have the claws made in rubber (good for footpaws) add 50p per claw.
Clear or translucent claws with other fillings are negotiable.

Colours will be mixed by eye. If exact colour matching is needed I recommend specifying in international panatone colours.
If the colours need to be absolutely accurate then there may be an additional fee.

Some combinations are not possible. For example the rubber claws cannot be translucent or readily fitted with LEDs as the rubber is too dense.

Claws are cast from quality silicone moulds taken from hand-carved oak masters, giving the final product a glossy finish with a realistic grain.
All claws are designed to be sewn in place to the end of the glove finger, giving superior retention. The base of each claw is drilled with 8 holes and a central recess for threads to cross.

Most claws and the are fully degassed in a vacuum chamber at the mixing AND casting stages to ensure against trapped bubbles weakening the casting, or visible bubbles in the case of clear/translucents. Striped claws however cannot be degassed at the casting stage or the layers will bleed into each other, so striped claws may be fractionly weaker than single-colour claws.

Yes I'm in the UK, and yes I will post internationally. Shipping is worked out on an order by order basis.
And yes I produce other items too, but I'm still finalising them for routine production. Noses, paw-pads and more.

Uploading all my old work too. Yeah it's partly gallery-padding, but it's also partly work I removed from FA several years back and never re-uploaded when I came back.
You'll find most of it popping up in my scraps, though a few may make it to the main gallery.

Enjoy! :P

I have an A0 size technical drawing board with parallel. I have some A0 card.

It's useless for technical drawing. I do lots of smaller drawings when I do, or it's something better done on the computer.

Could I ever draw an image that large? What should I do with it?

Something I've never been too comfortable with is expressing myself in an overt sexual way. I can talk about sex quite openly, even having long conversations about sex-ed and offering tips and advice. I like porn and so on, but there's still a sort of barrier in my mind from, say, going to a fetish nightclub, or having sexual artwork made (since Sci is my direct avatar).
I think it's because when someone becomes expressive about their own sexual identity, people tend to focus on it, and I'm a lot more than just someone who's into kinky-XYZ.
(That's a representative note, btw, not "Sesame Street XXX". Though the number 7 is totally asking for it.)

I'm mulling over the idea of making an extra avatar specificity to represent and explore kinks/sex. 'Cos I'd like to try drawing porn, and know intellectually I shouldn't be shy to express myself. So I'm thinking up a new avatar. A few things have come to mind so far. "Inverted colours from Sci, but with flames" seems to be most prominent in my head right now, even if it's a touch simple. But who doesn't like amateur raver porn?
Feels like it might be separate enough from "me" to make it comfortable.

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view.....worst-families

Well holy shit.

"THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday.
The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes.
They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.
Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.
Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far."

Yeah, we have social problems in the UK. Should government provide help and rehabilitation to those who need it? Probably yeah. Should we be okay with government agencies putting 24hr monitoring into private homes? How about fucking nooooo? Prisoners get better treatment than that! Knowing your every move is being scrutinised by a very literal Big Brother? Has that ever encouraged good behaviour or has it, say, caused resentment anger and lashing-out against the omnipresent authority?
I'm sure there's folks out there that need help, but if family's are really bad enough that you need to hire private security to visit them then it's not the job of government to try and teach them to be some idealised family unit. Get the kids out of there instead of using them as an experiment in social engineering.
There are already agencies in place that are supposed to deal with this. Social services, the police. But instead of fixing the flaws in procedures, the habit of a new expansive/expensive plan to go on top of it is thrown out instead.

2000 families have already gone through this process? Did it actually WORK on them? And yes, there's the ever-present Slippery Slope argument. The next logical step to me would be "offering" people in high crime areas to have their homes tied into a government run security/alarm system including internal CCTV. I say "offer" because if you go with it you'll get a discount on that nasty high house insurance! Who could refuse in a high crime area?

And once this new agency exists, it has to fight for it's survival like all others. What if it's a wonderful success? Great huh? Well then suddenly there's noone for it to look after! They put themselves out of a job! No, what happens is if their project works or they otherwise start running out of family's to target, then they'll have to change their parameters. They'll start taking on the less-bad family's to keep their numbers up. Or hell, do it anyway and your budget gets increased because there's "more demand"!

At what point do these Family Intervention Projects start acting on smaller and smaller problems? Child played truant and are on an SSRI? Sounds suspicious to me, better check in on them. Or christ, what if they're home-schooled?? Their parents could be doing anything to them!

"Mr Balls also said responsible parents who make sure their children behave in school will get new rights to complain about those who allow their children to disrupt lessons.
Pupils and their families will have to sign behaviour contracts known as Home School Agreements before the start of every year, which will set out parents’ duties to ensure children behave and do their homework."

Holy brainwashing batman! How many times have we heard of kids being "disruptive" by questioning or disagreeing with a teachers opinions? Or wearing a political Tshirt?
Agree with everything the teachers say and do or you're not allowed to complain about other students? Tow the party line or you will SUFFER! Or can you imagine the kid who acts out because other kids pick on him? But his parents can't complain because he's acting out because of it?
These are impressionable kids we're talking about here, and the only purpose this can serve is to indoctrinate kids from an early age to know that you don't act out against the powers that be.

"Think of the Children!"

Think of them growing up into voters who won't question anything those in power tell them to.

One day you too could be making unknowing amateur porno for some sweaty CCTV operator.

Also someone notes this is against Article 8 of the European convention on human rights. Well it would be if they weren't getting them to sign a contract which I presume will state they give permission for the surveillance. Letter of the law's more important than the spirit of it.

S'cuse me, I'm going to go back to building a big fucking robot.

EDIT: An additional note, they'll be checking for bed-times and proper meals? So if you're a vegan, what, they'll force you to feed your children meat? If you practice polyphasic sleep, they'll insist on giving you tranquillisers? At what unannounced point does "different" become "bad" in the eyes of this government agency? And what unspoken norm will they try to mould you into?

Right now I'm doing woodwork. My old workbench was not sufficient for the projects I wanted to do. So since I found a nice thick chunk of kitchen table I've been designing a new bench.

One end's done, and I'm just cutting the joints for the other side, back and front. It's got 5 legs (sounds odd, but for good reason), and each is a 4x4inch timber. With the angle-iron I'll be bracing the underside of the worksurface with, it'll be rock solid.

I'm also going to use my ebay'd router to carve some channels near the edges to stop small things rolling off onto the floor.

Art-wise I've been practising on the tablet some more and generally getting my drive back. I've got the layout of a character sheet I have to scan in and email to a comissioner (hoping for tonight!) to see if they aprove. Some other old art comissions also need polishing off, and I think I have the drive to!

I'm also making a robot.

What's up with you?

A certain awesome dragon from the 'states has joined FA. Go watch her, for she is awesome.

 icydarkstorm

Technical guff

Somewhere out there in the postal system is my "new" monitor.

I like making use of these vouchers ebay gives away every so often, so with 10% off and including postage I have an ex-corporate demo monitor on it's way to me for £88. 20", 1600x1200. Aspect ratio at the old 4:3, as it keeps in in step with that of the Wacom tablet.

It's been a busy time for this old box. New power supply, main HDD, swapped RAM around from 2 other machines and a new video capture card (which may be replaced yet again, shortly).

Still tweaking it here and there. Mostly the new screen should give me accurate colours again, as well as the screen space to run graphics software without having tool windows over half the image. Plus one of my current screens has developed a very poorly backlight.
Later in the year I should also be buying a decent 2nd hand graphics card off a friend that'll give another big boost to the box.

But hey, I can access all my software now, and run my VCR through the capture card so I can chuck my TV out.

Confuzzled

I'll be in the Dealers Den at Confuzzled this year, yet again. Mostly I'll be selling orders with a free shipping offer. Why not just bring a load of pre-made items to sell? Well the majority of people who've ordered from me so far have wanted specific colours mixed or odd numbers of items. So instead I'll be bringing a selection of examples of my work, and people can order from there.

I'm in a reasonably desperate race to get everything ready in time. Working on a Starborne Works banner, assembling the display case, new POS (point of sale) and mostly trying to get more production-grade demo items working. The latter means trying to finish my degassing chamber as no one wants bubbly resins, do they?
And in the midst of this, trying to push out any outstanding orders I have!

Oh, I'll have the usual sundry items with me again. Penny-stickers, wet-wipes and emergency sewing-kits. But they'll have a lot less prominence than previous cons.
They'll also be the complimentary jar of mints/toffees/chocolate coated ants, and my Surprisingly Good Laminator (with donation jar for it's use). I make even take sketch comissions!

That reminds me, got to get print-outs of previous work done too. Time's flying! See you all there I hope!

By the looks of it, a VERY well attended LondonFur meet tomorrow. Really bad timing for the UKFur forums to have crashed. Looks like a database problem.

To try and help people get to the meet, I've set up a temporary set of backup forums with times and directions.

http://www.ukfurries.net/forum/index.php

If you know someone coming along, please pass it along or we'll all get lost. :P

Like herding cats. Not surprising that, though.

Main machine is now up and running again without the packet corruption issue that's been plauging me for some months. It took a complete reinstall and bigger HDD to do it though.
The drive probably wasn't the issue, but after cobbling together a storage-drive machine, I'd swapped files about enough to have a 160Gb disk going spare. The Orange Box had filled my former 40Gb disk to bursting.

I'm still getting elements reinstalled, but I'm not seeing any problems at last. Once the virus scan on the storage machine's done, I can also grab a few other files and get on with more work.
I've got a deadline to have a conbook advert done by the end of the week, and have a bunch of photos I've been unable to update onto my business website. They're not much, but I've been tinkering with a number of small projects. It'll be good to have an update, as by now I'm sure most people think the site's gone dead.

I'm pretty short on cash, but on thursday I'll be putting a load of items onto ebay to exploit their new "99p start=no insertion fee" policy. Doesn't apply to business accounts though, so I'll be waiting until I'm no longer VAT registered before dumping business surplus onto ebay too.

Wait, personal life? What do you mean personal life? I have none.

I've done a little drawing, but outside standard items I'll be working to clear my decks on pre-existing items first and foremost.
I can also get to my bicycle again! Just about. With more exercise and lower transport costs, things will be good. <3

Every so often I find an artist on here who I'm sure I've seen before and have watched before. But that aren't on my watch list.
I've got a lot on my watch list, so it's hard to be sure, but it does feel like on occasion someone gets randomly removed from it without me realising.

Normally, this is where we send you on some birthday fling. But according to our records, you're in a happy relationship. So we'll respect that and just send you...a giant birthday cake:

What? My relationship's set to "Available"! I really want a birthday fling now, meanies. ;_;

(I'll have the cake anyway though)

So if you have an artist draw in your sketchbook at a con, what do you do about it when you get home?
I see lots of artists putting up works they've done in others sketchbooks, so unless they have a scanner right there and then, the folk these were drawn for are sending the artists the scans.

So you just email them and offer them a scan of their own work? Somehow it just feels a bit course/rough.