FA Users: Quit Whining
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting really, REALLY fucking tired of hearing “I have new art/photos/writings/whatevers to show off, but FA is down, so I can’t”. I see this on LJ, on forums (including one with an integrated image gallery o.O), on IRC, and in IM conversations. I can’t turn around without hearing someone whine about FA being down, and claiming that they can’t share media on the internet without it.
Here’s a bit of a newsflash, people: This is the internet! It was built for exactly this purpose! There are literally thousands of websites out there designed solely to help you share your media, whatever format it happens to be in. Some of them have communities surrounding them, some of them don’t. Some of them like furries, some of them don’t. Some of them have as piss-poor reliability as FA, but the vast majority are more stable. But, they’re out there, and the selection is overwhelming.
Plus, if you can’t find a site out there to your liking, you can even make your own! It’s easy, really, and there’s no complicated licensing or anything. Just decide whether you want to pay for this or not, find a host that doesn’t suck (hint: if it’s not AOL, Geocities, Tripod, or Freewebs, it probably doesn’t suck), and throw together a basic website in the application of your choice. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can build a website; it might not be the greatest, but it’s better than whining about FA and doing nothing.
Or, if you must have social networking feedback on your media, there’s plenty of those sites too! And almost all of them have ways of sharing text, images, and audio. They come in many flavours, with varying degrees of suck, but they’re out there and easy to find.
Even LJ (where you’re probably reading this) has a rudimentary, poorly-designed gallery that, while difficult for random people to navigate, will allow you insert your images into LJ posts.
In any case, there are infinite solutions to this problem that are more productive than whining about FA. So, find one you like, use it, and stop whining! You can always go back to FA if/when it comes back; this is the internet, it’s not like you need a passport to go from one site to another. But in the meantime, if you do something productive, you’ll still be able to share your work (or your commissions; I should clarify that most of the people I hear this bullshit from are not artists themselves), and your internet life will continue. And, who knows, you might even find a new social group to interact with, or you might find that you really like running your own website. Just stop whining about it, ok?
July 13th, 2008 at 22:50:26
Thanks for postin’ Felix. It is getting re-god-damn-diculous at this point. Oh noez, FA is down and I can’t possibly just use one of the 4893723876 other furry art gallery sites. Whiners…
July 13th, 2008 at 22:55:25
They could also do one of over 9,000 other possible activities on the Internet that doesn’t involve art; or, they could just turn the damn computer off and rest their eyes for a bit. God knows they probably need a shower, anyway! =xoD hehe
July 13th, 2008 at 22:59:08
I do support FA and I do hope they come up soon, but I am living without it just fine.
July 13th, 2008 at 23:00:29
Amen Brother!
Praise Jeebus!
Can I get a Hallelujah!?
July 13th, 2008 at 23:25:31
I keep hearing people say they have no place to HOST their art when there is places like Photobucket even for those that have no knowledge of doing their own gallery.
/sigh
July 13th, 2008 at 23:45:49
The hard part is finding/joining a gallery that will host adult art, as far as I see it. But I haven’t really delved too deep yet into that. Does Artspots or VCL (if it even exists anymore?) allow adult postings. Or even DA?
July 13th, 2008 at 23:49:04
Yes, VCL exists, and yes, they allow porn. DA is a bit restrictive, they only allow “artistic nudity” (which is about all I care about, personally, porn isn’t my thing). I’m not sure about Artspots/Jaxpad’s policies, but there’s a similar site called Furry Art Pile that I’m pretty sure allows it.
July 14th, 2008 at 1:19:29
Yerf went away for good a few years ago and I survived. Actually, I found that I had other fun things to do, which was unfortunate for the two or three people who were following my work. But such is life.
July 14th, 2008 at 4:17:03
Aye, I wouldn’t miss the stuff that gets on FA but won’t stay on most other places. I’ve not yet investigated Furry Art Pile but I’ve noticed a few folks using it where they might have used FA previously. The lesson, of course, is not to treat any particular site as your One True Source…
July 14th, 2008 at 8:49:13
People keep complaining FA is down… it is getting extremely annoying reading every other post in LJ is someone complaining FA is down.
I can’t draw and suck at anything artistic unless I’m painting the inside of a building or something, but even still, if they don’t like it being down so long, I agree with them finding some other place or even creating their own site. Technically creating their own website to host their works is another form of art in a way.
Right off the bat, there’s VCL, Deviant Art (DA), and a few others I got bookmarked that you can upload stuff to, and they have a very high uptime.
July 14th, 2008 at 9:24:51
As far as ArtSpots is concerned, there’s the even more similar site (heck, it uses the same software) http://www.furverts.net/
Wikifur seems to be a good resource for finding lists of this stuff
July 14th, 2008 at 15:00:29
You’d think people would at least know about Imageshack and (as much as I dislike it) Photobucket by now. Or maybe they’re the kind of people who don’t want people ever seeing stuff they drew without getting a pageview increase out of it.
Sites like FurAffinity do weird things to some people.
July 14th, 2008 at 15:02:13
What is this FA thing people keeping go on about. Did the world stop spinning… NOPE! I will go look for spoo material elsewhere
July 14th, 2008 at 16:02:04
Thank you Felix you ARE the pwner. But btw, is there a pattern with Yerf going down year by year and now FA, hrm. Talk about poor management.
Maybe you should start charging artists for hosting, eh Felix? *nudge nudge roll roll*
July 14th, 2008 at 18:25:46
These people should do what I do: have another gallery! Besides FA, I also have one on DeviantArt. Say what you will about DA, but it never goes down the way FA does. And their print services are cool.
July 14th, 2008 at 19:49:10
eh, at one point I used to post my art on my own web page, I always found it a pain in the butt to run because I’d rather concentrate on creating art then dealing with HTML. Word, Photoshop, and those sites do indeed make web pages though I’ve found it to be rather sloppy because I always have to go back and edit all the HTML so it’ll work on a normal site
VCL is very restrictive and hard to get an account on, FAP is okay though I’m really getting tired of the mix of arrogance and jealousy against FA constantly being touted. DA is too restrictive of what art can be posted too so it’s not worth bothering unless I want to only post clean stuff. \
Photobucket and Imageshack, I’ve tried them out but found it annoying that to view images on it, they sometimes require people to get an account. Which doesn’t make it very easy to have others view my stuff.
I still have that account on your server though I haven’t used it, I’ll definitely have to take care of that at some point. Wish I didn’t keep getting distracted.