It is possible you have seen this picture before, but I have lately typed a heap beneath it.
A series.
I had some difficulty putting this on to stupid art sites. There are no smart art sites. Deviantart, one of the stupidest, with a maximum preview size of 150×150 pixels, displays it like this before it is clicked on:
Most people will NOT click on something that looks like that. Additionally, most people will not click something that I put up, and those two facts work toward a common goal.
The preview image is generated automatically by reducing the image enough that its longer dimension (vertical or horizontal) is 150 pixels long. For an image whose proportions overwhelmingly favor one (vertical in this case) the reduced edition is totally unintelligible.
A custom thumbnail option would be nice. I would make my own preview that showed much of the first section, with a bit of text to indicate that there were four more images beneath it. I believe there used to be such an option. What happened to it?
People would fill their gallery completely with obnoxious icons that gave no information and only said “full view only!” because they were more obsessed with controlling people and increasing their meaningless “page view” total than actually helping people look at their art, because scumbags always win. Instead of visitors having enough information to decide if they should look or not look, they were forced to look just to find out what the ding dang thing was, if they dared to care. In this case, where the privilege was revoked, they won by making other people lose. I prefer to make fictional people lose. I included “death by ice” in this example but somebody else might call it “Frapbi’s frozen frustration” just to ensure it was as unenticing as possible. It also assumes that you know who frapbi is (frapbi is a loser).
These days most minimally informative thumbnail enthusiasts fixate on a face from within the image, giving a viewer a scrap of context but still not enough to know anything apart from “yes this image includes a being with a head.” This is considered an improvement, for some reason, by many people, but I do find it much more helpful. I am not fond of faces out of context. I do not always like faces in context. I may prefer context to faces. If I follow one person and see one new face a day, alright, I can look at that. If I get five hundred faces I do not have time to personally investigate the agoraphobic potential of each. And sometimes the “full” version would just be the face again but bigger! Rage!
Shut your mouthstache, you torsoless hatlump!
One especially gorkly individual used the exact same “full view!” dead-eyed, spider-lashed varmint icon on every picture regardless of what it contained. I presume. I never dared to check what they were hiding. Perhaps it was worse.
Additionally, I had made that recreation there based on my memory of the real one, but with that memory I gradually recalled that long ago I had saved a collection of utterly nonthreatening animal/anime people off of deviantart or worse drawn trying to be edgy or abusive toward their viewers –that is how you build an audience, after ehhh– and that the creature in question was featured therein, and that I should take the opportunity to make my facsimile horribler. The one I drew first looks like rather a reasonable chap by comparison. Although in the interest of fairness I should disclose that it was addressing a remark at “faggots” and not exhibiting a central digit, and that specific the full view demand icon was doing neither of those things, although it might as well have been.
I should make a public exhibition of my collection, although I reckon that some of these pictures are more than ten years old and it is mildly possible the artists realize what silly behavior that is by now. Alternatively, they could be now far worse and would interpret my exhibition as “art theft” and evidence that I wish I had the capacity to be so middle-fingery myself. This would then inspire them to draw more pictures of cartoon characters being angry at all real people, necessitating that I add them to my collection and I do not necessarily have time to make that a full time task.
Also, at some point my awareness of it makes me look bad. I should really leave that without further comment, but
The only thing harder core than drawing/paying someone else to draw an animal shaped like a human adult meant to represent you shoving a middle finger at the viewer is if this character is wearing a plastic disposable diaper and no trousers over the diaper. Folks fantasize about this. “oh MAN I WISH i could take off my pants, put on a diaper and then go around picking fights with people.” They find some acceptance for their personal habits and eventually it becomes a way of life intent on waging war with other ways of life. Coexisting peacefully is not an option. Diaperus iacta est.
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Pigbuster sez:
The anatomy/perspective of Mr. Badge is so bizarre that at first I thought he had Rayman-style non-arms. It seems he’s just hiding them however. The frostbitten/yeti hands remain undetermined. The fingernails mean they aren’t simply blue gloves.
I would not be surprised for a second if there was someone out there who has an e-gallery inexplicably filled with raymanny animally men. I’d be worried if there wasn’t!
PurpleSpace sez:
Sometimes I have created icons that only focus on a headshot of the character, but it was mostly due to seeing other people doing the same and assuming that’s how people liked to see previews of images.
I assure you it was not to trick people into seeing something they would normally not want to view.
Heapinfrimp sez:
busto:
I have certainly seen derivative raymen of varying shapes but they never reached epidemic numbers. It seems a basic matter to put a snout and pointy ears on one, but these are not the most independently-minded people we are dealing with. Also, it would be much harder to reproduce that in a $2000 full-body costume. I -have- seen megaman types with animal parts, even though that seems like it should be harder to draw.
spacko:
I have clarified my wording! The face focus is not misleading, just under-informative, at least to my perception, and a great many people do it. But the intention perhaps differs.
pzkfw sez:
when I use art sites I do something I call “write only mode”, as in I basically pretend there is no way to comment. I really hate to sound like the “removal of features is a feature” guy but it’s only because it just always turns into room for more smelly drama.
in the old days pageviews were nothing more than ego stroking, but now ad serving sites teach you that winning at pageviews means you are winning at the internet because you will get more ad money. this is why clickbait exists, pages the author knows is mostly or entirely fake but is edgy as possible because they know it will get views – even ironic views or “I wonder what bs this idiot is going to spout” views STILL count as ad views, even if you don’t want them to. the only way to fight this is to have one person create a screenshot the page or copypaste the text, but that’s really just not going to happen often enough.
the best example of clickbait is “THE DESKTOP IS DEAD”, I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong that is, it started in late 2009 and they said that the desktop and even at times the laptop would be gone in six months. They have been saying that ever since because they know that it will, time and time again, get views.
pzkfw sez:
cont.
you should know by now deviantart is never going to change. no matter how hard it tries to pretend it is a legit art site, the truth is that deviantart is simply h-foundry and r34 lite edition. any form of real art is buried reddit-style under a mountain of anime fetish garbage, or just straight up porn labeled as “art” to get around the rules. any time there are rules, someone will find a way to get around it. for example, if you can’t draw kiddy porn, you can pull a disgaea and claim your character has a kid body but is 1,000 years old. and if your art does get deleted or banned, you can create the same dramastorm and turn it into more attention for you. of course, if you aren’t a good little boy and play along with the porn game, the site consensus will be to return the favor by not giving you any credit or attention at all.
pzkfw sez:
(sorry to break these up but I apparently was using a flagged word and it would not let me post).
cont.
it reminds me of a 60s PSA style film I saw a long time ago about the concern of playboy and porno magazines being distributed around america so that children could easily get their hands on them. I can’t find it now (that is a running theme with stuff I bring up with you, I know) but I remember the guy’s face and how concerned he was with how easy the porn was being distributed. I would love to see his reaction to the internet where literally the single barrier to get it is to know how to read and write any language, and there is almost nothing anyone can realistically do to keep it from coming in.
any computer or phone, even if it isn’t your property, can be used as a porn distribution device. the fact that most parents still royally suck at computers means it’s even more hopeless to control it. and there isn’t even a money barrier since in the old days a four year old wouldn’t be able to buy a magazine, now you can download that sort of thing for FREE – so you can’t even control it with money.
I’m not trying to say all porn should be censored, the point is that the individual choice to look at it or not is now something that has to be made incredibly early, a difference of probably 15 years, and it’s because of the internet. so it has radically changed our culture. but the worst part is how it has changed it for art.
when most people online talk about an “artist” they mean a cartoon or furry porn artist, and “art” now means “porn”. saying that you are an artist and then having anything besides this is taken to be like a hipster or something. so the moral of the story is… you’re screwed for trying to make something unique. congrats.
also, our paint style is so similar it’s scary. no joke.
Heapinfrimp sez:
The previous major version of wordpress I used had almost no junk moderation ability, so I had to block a ludicrous quantity of words, and even then I had to lock posts for comments after a week or so, because I only set “suspicious” comments to be held for personal approval, so I would still need to go through hundreds to see if one was valid. After a certain upgrade the junk removal inexplicably began working and I seem to have neglected to unblock all the words. I have done it now, though. My guess is that “porn” was setting the mechanism off, since that is routinely one of a robot’s first words.
I would say, as a parent, to just not give your kid a telephone, especially not one with internet but the media government orders people to accept that as normal, plus one more service you pay for every month until you die, so most will/already have given in. How does anybody have time to worry about pornography?
I tried using “real” art sites like Saaaaaatchi and Fine Art America but they are so focused on sales and embodying the stereotyped pretentiosity of the “real” “art world” that I never got anywhere. Can I just upload a picture? No I have to futz around with frame specifications and genre keywords. The minimum sale price that allows the site to get the cut it demands is typically beyond what I consider reasonable to charge in the first place and then only gets me about 15 cents unless I overcharge considerably more than that. And if I do not provide sales information plus tax documents (?!) it removes my own image description in favor of an ad on my page that says “THIS WORK IS NOT FOR SALE BUT CLICK HERE AND WE WILL SHOW YOU SOMETHING THAT IS” and my disgust cannot be contained.
I have had one or two good experiences with the garbage sites, fortunately. It is at worst an 85% waste of effort.