Alright so it's been a while since last page, and I apologize. Time and money are always against me as far as that's concerned. I have been commissioning WFA to draw the pages for me and I just color them since I can do the coloring fairly quickly. It's just the drawing part that really kills me. I was never good at putting ideas to paper very quickly, and drawing has just been really difficult for me lately so I haven't been doing any, as you might have noticed. So I had an idea...

The reason I haven't had a page lately is because I'm at work trying to get it published. Currently, I'm getting the proper synopsis and 20 page script treatment finished. Soon as that's ready, I'll be shopping it around to different comic publishers in the hopes that someone will bite and I can finally get this thing into people's hands like I've been wanting to do since 2005 when I started it. Yes, it's that old and I'm that slow. Again, I apologize. I really wanted this to go a lot smoother/faster.

If nothing really comes of it, it'll really suck and sure, I'll get over it but it'll be a bummer for people not to get a chance to enjoy the story I worked so hard on. If I can't get it published as a comic, I might try and work it as a novel, since writing is something I don't have a problem doing. I would just rather it have visuals to go with it is all. Ah well, wish me luck I guess.

Me and Torque got to talking about stuff one night and I started to think about certain things I don't like that the majority of other people love. There's a few things that I expect people to be like "What the hell? OMG you HAVE to like that!" but that's the fun of it. I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts and maybe list stuff they can't stand but everyone else they know totally digs it.

Most of these will be video game or movie related. I'll put a little description as to why I didn't like it. I also don't need any reasons from people who did like it why I'm wrong. For whatever reason, I just fall into a small cluster of people who don't like obviously awesome stuff. My loss right?


1. CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY / WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
For some reason, I could never sit through an entire viewing of either movie. The first one is a musical for sure, but that's not what turns me away from it. Honestly I just didn't get why the candy was so important we needed a movie about it. Plus that river looked like poo.

2. LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY
I love fantasy anything. I knew the trilogy of books are responsible for shaping fantasy into what it is now, but holy crap were those movies boring. Four hours of two dudes talking to each other and walking to the right of the screen. Battles ensue, people die, and all they had to do was ride the griffins over the mountain and drop the ring down the volcano from the beginning.

3. AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT
This game was supposed to be really scary, like REALLY scary. I saw reaction vids on youtube and couldn't believe how people were screaming and yelling at it. I played it and couldn't have been more bored. Firstly, the game is about you having amnesia, but SPOILER, within the first ten minutes you get a note from yourself telling you why you erased your own memory. WTF? Well...game solved! Now what? Oh, walk around and look at an old castle where nothing happens...ever. Until random un-scary monster run at you and you have to hide in a closet. I dunno, I think a game that invokes my own imagination into messing with me is more effective than atmosphere.

4. HALO
I already had a PS2 and GameCube at the time, so a third console didn't seem warranted. I did notice the graphics were slightly improved over the PS2, but everybody kept talking about how awesome Halo was. I played it and was bored within the first 15 minutes. Nothing about the game seemed innovative or special. The levels were hokey and kind of reminded me of Turok 3 for the Nintendo 64, which I also hated. I assume the main draw for the game was it was the first console FPS to have online multiplayer. Unfortunately for me, I hate multiplayer FPS games so...fail.

5. MASS EFFECT SERIES
Any game where I have to spend more time talking than playing might as well be a movie. Speaking of...

6. METAL GEAR SOLID SERIES
I really liked the PlayStation 1 game, but after that I just couldn't sit through hours of inane conversation about nukes, government and the military. Just let me shoot stuff!

That's all I can think of for now. I'd put My Little Pony in there, but that horse has been beaten to death already. (heh) So yeah, what's some stuff you guys hate that everyone else likes and you just can't understand why they like it so much? It'd be interesting to hear.

A while back, I bought a new GeForce GTX 560Ti video card and it came with a free copy of Batman: Arkham City which wasn't even out yet. When the game unlocked on it's release date, I got into it and it was okay. Kind of seemed like a carbon copy of the first game but whatever. Then, I actually went and upgraded the rest of my pc as well. After a fresh install of Windows on my new hard drive, I go to play the game and behold! My save game is missing. I knew it wasn't because I didn't back it up, it was saved to the Steam cloud, so what the hell?

Well, it turns out the save files have DRM on them, and the encryption key for them is unique to your Windows installation so if you reformat or anything, your saves are trashed. That's...awesome. I'd played five hours of the game only to have to start over now? That's pretty shitty. Eff off Batman, I'm going back to Skyrim.

So uh, wow, thanks for all the birthday wishes you guys. Wasn't expecting it. Yep, I hit the big three-oh yesterday. A friend at work who I've known since middle school brought cupcakes and candles for me and another dude who shares the same birthday. That was neat. The other thing I noticed was that we had a full moon, and I was born on a full moon so that'll help me run with my werewolf motif here.

I got my x-mas bonus last week and decided it was time for an entirely new pc, so that's been ordered and is on it's way. I pretty much chose the parts from tigerdirect.com and just am gonna build it myself as I've done with the last three pc's I've bought. The next thing I need to take care of is getting a new page of Cry of the Wolf done by WFA so that'll be coming up.

That's about it. I just got home, so I'm gonna eat and watch Mongrels on hulu.com. It's been a while since I've seen any muppety shows and it actually looks kind of neat since it's more adult oriented. See ya!

Q - "So Maglot, what have you been up to lately?"

A - "Skyrim. O_o"

Since it's launched, this game has sank it's fangs into me and drug me off to it's cave to feed it's young. That makes no sense, but neither does the amount of time I've spent in this game. Bethesda seems to know how to scratch every itch I have for video games. I haven't been this enthralled with pixels on a screen since I first started World of Warcraft and while that was a good obsession for a while, I haven't really touched it since 11-11-11 hehe.

So I'm sitting here waiting for my iPod to sync before I get off to bed here and just thought I'd let people know I'm not dead. I guess I should get the obligatory art stuff out of the way. No, there's no new art. Blame Skyrim if you wish. No, there's no new comic page. Skyrim's fault as well. I spent that commission money on PC upgrades so there probably won't be another page until January what with x-mas gifts and all. Damn you video games.

Honestly though, I haven't had the urge to draw anything for a long time. I kind of want to, but I don't care if I do or not. I think if I did get rid of all these distractions, I might fall into it more naturally like I did back when I was in school and the internet wasn't readily available me. I think I used to draw more because I had these character ideas in my head and had no way to see them on paper so I just drew it myself. Now that I have the internet and sites like this, I can just browse all the art I like and be satisfied that way. I kinda wish I could get back into that mindset. Ah well.

Alright so I figure I'd do a quick update. WFA finished the inks on the next page of Cry of the Wolf, so I'm gonna get to coloring that this weekend. I know people have been asking about it and waiting patiently, sorry it couldn't come sooner. A lot of it depends on whether or not I have the money for the commission, and whether or not she has the time to work on it because she's doing art full-time now for scratch. Anyway, I just wanted to assert that I will continue to work on the comic unless I say otherwise, so no need to worry or ask if I quit on it or when it's coming. Just rest assured that new pages will come, just not regularly and not as often as both you and I would like. If I win the lottery, I'll surely hire her to do it and we'll publish it or something, which would be awesome.

Aside from that, I've slowly been working on the loincloth/belt that goes to my fursuit. I had to learn on-the-fly how to make molds and cast resin. I wasted a lot of materials but it was still fun. I'm probably a third of the way through the project so maybe a few more weeks and I'll have it done and I can take some pictures. Should be sweet once I get it looking like it does in this picture. [link]

Alright so I'm trying to make the belt/loincloth for my fursona as seen in this pic. [link]

The thing I'm having trouble with is making that green socketed gem. I've tried sculpting it out of clay and using a sort of rubber-cement mold making compound. The sculpt was lumpy and the epoxy resin had a matte finish. That went in the trash.

Next I tried using a ceramic bowl, figuring I'd get a smoother, more consistent look from it. Even with mold release, it stuck to the damn bowl. I tried to break the bowl and get the resin out, but it just broke it in half and scratched it up as well.

So does anyone have any ideas/websites that can point me in the right direction? I really want to get a cool polished translucent gem look and not resort to painting some clay solid green. I'll even buy one if there's a place that sells them at 5 inches or so. Can anyone help a wolf out?

So I watched the last movie with last night and to my surprise, I didn't really like it that much. I dunno what it is. I had read the last two books after watching the first five movies in a row, and couldn't wait to find out what happened next. I mean the plot devices are great, but it seemed in my head at least, the action was on a much larger scale. The movie did a good job with the siege scenes that were shown. There was a lot of stuff going on. I just kind of wished there was...I dunno more to it? Maybe I'm kinda mad cuz I don't have another one to look forward to next year? Who knows. It's over now, time to find something else to nerd out on.

Just got back from watching it a few minutes ago. Holy crap. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is easily the best super-hero movie ever. Yep. I'm pretty satisfied with that.

Maybe it's the writing and direction. It's all told in such a believable way, and it never lingers on a part too long to be boring. The plot moves on a really good pace and you are always given interesting scenes throughout. Every character is explored, and you see what drives them. It touches on what it means to be different and how one wants to hide it to be accepted.

I'm not a huge comic book fan, so I haven't really dove into the X-Men comics, but I did watch a great deal of the cartoon in the 80's and all three of the previous movies. I did enjoy seeing them bring up things I had forgot about, and was glad to see that they hadn't been forgotten by the film's creators.

Also, Beast was amazingly well-done. He had a pretty neat transformation sequence, and his appearance was a nice blend of special effects makeup and CGI. They really only used CGI when it was necessary to make him emote more (growl or roar). They added in some cool animal grunts/breath sounds that you haven't heard in every other movie where they use them off a sound library CD or something.

Magneto is a bad-ass too. I prefer him to the Gandalf version hehe. His past is explored a great deal in this film and you feel more for him and his motives for what he does. Really everyone in the movie is given that treatment. They all feel real and fleshed out, not 2D like they were in the other movies.

So uh...yeah, thoughts? Anyone who hasn't seen it interested? Anyone who has seen it and disagrees?

Bloody Roar is one of my favorite game series of all time. It's kind of a given since it heavily involves people transforming into anthropomorphic animals mid-fight. How can you NOT love that? Well the game wasn't very deep in any sense, believe me. It was a simple button masher with werewolves, tigers, foxes, lions, chameleons, boars, bats, leopards, rabbits and many other breeds. Fun times. I knew the series was going downhill after the release of 3 for the PS2. It was a decent game, but it was lacking what made the first two so great. Then it got ported to GameCube and called "Primal Fury" where most of the crap was fixed, and it got a horrible storyline. Then that got ported to Xbox (where they called it Bloody Roar eXtreme) and had a new character plus a CG intro instead of an anime one. Then THAT got ported back to PS2 and they just called it Bloody Roar 4, oh but it had blood in it again.

Too many ports too often, people stopped caring. That's what happens. I was really hoping for a next-gen release on the PS3/Xbox360, but time passed and nothing showed. I looked it up not too long ago and found that Hudsonsoft actually DID start on BR5 this past February, but not long after closed their doors due to bankruptcy. So...yay. Dash my hopes to pieces why don't you? Thanks a lot.

In other news, I was doing a vanity search (put your name in Google and see what comes up) and I found this site.

[link]

It appears to be a thread on some Vietnamese forum where someone used a picture of mine to do a mock-up of BR5. The sad thing was, even though the picture is clearly a 2D drawing, many of them believed it! It was a funny read. One of them said "Maglot appears to be from ancient times". Correct, but I'm not in the game, sadly. Ah well. Here's hoping we get some other type of furry videogame. I miss all those mascot ones we had in the 80's. Sonic seems to be the only one still alive and kicking.

Aside from getting up a half-hour later than I wanted to start, everything went pretty smoothly! Thanks to everyone who showed up, it was more than I expected. I'll be streaming the rest of the pic later during the week. Keep an eye peeled for updates.

All these streaming services have been gaining popularity lately, so naturally, I've been avoiding it.

I've been seeing a ton of artist use it on a regular basis, but I've never really been motivated enough to use it since it takes me ages to get anything done and I don't really want to bore people. However, I was wondering if anyone liked the idea of me doing live streaming tutorials? It could be how to draw stuff, or how to use Photoshop, you name it. I really enjoy helping people when I can so that seems like it would be fun to do.

I have actually been messing with the services for a while now, and found one that works for me, so it'll be at [link] when it is up and running for future streams. Just kinda comment and let me know what you think, or what you'd like to see from me.

So yeah, as you might have surmised from the pics I've been posting, I has fursuit. Been wanting to get one for a loooong time (since I was 12 or so if you can believe that) and I finally got it. Scribble did an excellent job on it, and I couldn't have asked for more really. I actually got it a couple weeks ago but got sick soon after so that delayed taking some proper pictures. I felt well enough this weekend to finally get out and take some at our state park. I managed to pick up two ticks and a boatload of briars on my footpaws but was otherwise unscathed hehe.

So now comes planning for what con I'm gonna be going to, since that's another thing I've wanted to do for a long time. I don't have the money at the moment but that will be my next goal. So until then, enjoy the pics and uh...stuff.

By now I'm sure those of you who're following me have noticed a dramatic drop-off of new art. I haven't really felt the urge to draw anything in a long, long time. It's become a problem I guess, but it's not really troubling to me at all that I don't mind giving it up if I have to. There is one catch though, and that's my comic. It's the only thing I ever really gave any true effort into crafting and making it as perfect as possible. I started writing the script on it late 2004, and it's the one thing I really want to see to the end, even if I don't want to draw it anymore.

To remedy this, I've been commissioning to draw the pages for me, and I color them in. The end result is fantastic, and I wouldn't have it any other way if I can help it. However, this comes with two problems; time and money.

WFA has her own commission list which is growing by the day, and I haven't got a completely disposable income. Any time I have the cash to get a new page from her, I send it over. Then, it's just a matter of whether she has the time to draw it, and if I have the time to color it and get it posted. This makes new pages further apart than I want them to be, but it can't be helped really. I ask everyone watching to please be patient and enjoy the pages as they come. Asking "When is the next page coming?!" isn't going to make it come any faster, and I honestly have no clue so I can't really answer.

As a side note, I have something else I'll be posting pictures of within the next couple weeks, depending on when it arrives in the mail. It's been a long time coming but it's finally done and should be pretty awesome. Until then, take care.

So yeah, it's the holidays and whatnot and I just bought a new 3D tv so I'm a little short on money to commission WFA for the next "Cry of the Wolf" page. I should get my x-mas bonus by the end of this month so we'll see how it goes. However, if you do feel like donating to get the ball rolling, send whatever via PayPal at maglot@gmail.com

There...now I feel dirty.

With the last journal entry being the barrel of laughs and silent treatment that it was, I figure hey, it's time to do some real updates 'n stuff! Yes, you can EXPECT A COMIC PAGE NO LATER THAN THIS WEEKEND! But wait, there's more!

You know how I said I didn't really want to draw, but I wanted to keep my comic going? Well I found a great artist who was willing to work with me on it. She goes by WFA or Jocelyn, and she'll be doing the pencils/inks for the comics from now on (unless things change in the future) and I'll be doing the coloring as usual.

I know some of you probably are like, "What the hell? Lazy bastard, can't even draw your own shit." But uh...yeah? So? I like how I color, I hate how my lines look and hers are amazing. It's all towards the benefit of the comic, and I'll be a lot happier doing it. Plus, we've decided on getting roughly one page per month done, provided she's not terribly busy so that will make things go more smoothly and faster, which is what I wanted mainly.

She's got a sketch of it on her FA gallery if you can't stand the wait. The colored version will be here soon as it's done, stay tuned. Oh, and here's a link to her page. [link]

I started thinking about it today, and I realized I hadn't put a new picture up in nearly five months. That's almost half a year without any new art. It kind of got me thinking about what this means for me. Growing up, I never had any money so I drew for fun. Any time I did get money, I'd spend it on video games or movies and do that instead, until I got sick of it. I'd then go back to drawing.

Now that I'm older and have a good-paying job, I can afford to buy all the games, movies and toys I want to keep me entertained. The downside of that is I work 50 hours a week, so I don't have a lot of free time during the week to get my entertainment needs. Apparently Sagittarians need lots of that, if "The Sims" is right hehe.

Anyway, if you've talked to me before and mentioned that I had a lot of talent, you might have noticed I get a little defensive and upset. Reason being, drawing was never easy for me; I had to struggle (and still do) to get a picture done. Talent is something that comes naturally, so it was like saying what you do is easy for you, when it wasn't. That's not the point though. It's work. Drawing is hard work at times, and work is NOT fun. I work 50 hours a week. I don't want to come home and work MORE, or do something that I don't think is fun. In what little time I have, I want to play some games or whatever, something entertaining, something fun.

So I guess what I'm ranting about here is, I hate drawing, and I don't want to do it anymore. My comic is about the only thing I've ever done that I'm really proud of, and I want to continue working on it, but I don't want to fucking DRAW it cuz it just pisses me off. I asked a couple of fellow artists to work on it via commission ($100 per page if you're interested) but have had no real takers so far. So yeah...maybe when I run out of games to play, I might come back to art, but until then, don't expect anything from me.

Just figured I'd get that last journal off the page and put something fresh up. End of the year bonus and income tax returns ought to help out with the car situation, aside from everybody's commissions (thanks by the way).

Something good did come out of that though. It got me motivated to draw again. I have to admit, I'm pretty much fresh out of ideas for things to draw. One can only draw so many wolves just standing around before one loses interest. Anyhow, I never used to like doing commissions because I actually don't like drawing at all. I love to create things, drawing is just one way to do that. But back when I used to draw and do commissions at the same time, I ended up not having time to draw personal stuff cuz I was always working on the commissions.

Since I've pretty much given up drawing for myself, I figure I'll start doing commissions from now on. Same prices as before. I'm gonna add the info to my account so everyone can look it up if need be. I am gonna have to take a break on that for now though because of the holidays. Last one I did "Reid" was right in the middle of Thanksgiving week and I was forced to have him wait over a week for his drawing which I'm not proud of. So after all this family togetherness crap is over, I'll have more free time to get drawings done for everyone hehe.

My car broke down recently and required pretty much every bit of money I had saved up and then some to repair. I'm not one to really beg for help in this way so it's sort of awkward for me to do this but I've decided to start taking commissions. Yep, you heard me. I guess it's time for me to play everyone's favorite game; Shut Up and Draw!

Here's the prices.

Pencil - $20
Ink    - $30
Color  - $50

Subject matter in each picture is limited to one character and a simple background. Nothing sexual in any sort of way. Violence is fine. No copyrighted stuff. Note me with the details if you're interested. I accept payment through paypal. I'll take the first 10 people and once those are done, I'll stop for a while and then start taking another 10. First come, first served. Anything else, just ask.

So, my old site at www.maglot.com is down for good. It got to be a pain in the ass to manage, and DA is just so much easier. Since it is gone, and I had so say "exlusive" art on it, I have decided to move all of my older art onto this account. You can check them out in the "Scraps" section, since they're pretty ugly by my current skill standards hehe. Enjoy!

Oh, just one more thing, there should be more to come soon, I only uploaded a good chunk of it for now, still have some left I have to get to but my back is killing me!

Also, thanks for all the comments on my last journal entry. I did make a few new friends, and it feels great to talk to new people. Thanks everyone.