My journal was sooo overdue an update, hehe!

This is just a quick entry to wish all my friends and watchers a happy holiday season. By way of a "thank you" for all your support I have made something for you... hope you like it!



_{PS. Do feel free to add this to any "gift art" collection or area on your journal if you want to... I know some of you like to do this. There's no need to ask permission or anything - if you watch me or I watch you then this is defintely meant for you!}

Oh, and for anyone who might have missed it I also uploaded a Christmas wallpaper a week or two back:




With all my love and best wishes for a safe and happy end to 2009...

- Chris x x

This is just a warning to anyone who has been approached by a user called ~debora321 to try out a program she has allegedly written, to speed up rendering time in Ultra Fractal... do NOT download this file as it apparently contains one or more Trojans (i.e. malware) that are designed to steal your fractal parameters.

S/he calls the program "Fractal Magic" and the filename is "FMsetup.exe".

Much more info is available on *LaPurr's journal here: [link] including a few more details on one of the Trojans used. Please check it out and respond with any comments there (as I have) - I'm just providing an informative heads-up via my journal to people who may not have read about this news yet. We need to get the word round to all UF users quickly so nobody else gets caught out.

Take care, my friends!

- Chris x x

I don't know if this is a feature currently enabled for beta testers only or for everyone... but have you noticed how deviation pages have changed their look slightly, and how the infamous Share link buttons (for quick linking to social network sites like My TwitfaceSpace) are now not automatically present on every deviation?

_{[Edited later to correct what I initially said... which was factually wrong...]}
On closer investigation, on the "Edit deviation" page, I see that these buttons are by default disabled on all existing deviations (good!)... at least that's what I'm seeing on my gallery, this doesn't seem to be true for everyone, unfortunately. An "Edit" button gives the following three options for that deviation:

"Encourage (Recommended)
These helpful links make it easy for people to share and promote this work on social networks -- and in the process, provide proper credit and linkage back to the original deviation.
Discourage

Discourage sharing and embedding. This does not prevent people from sharing your work on the web, it simply removes the helpful links for doing so. It also removes tools that provide you with proper crediting if your work is shared.

Discourage and Viewable Only for deviantART Members
Discourage sharing & embedding features, and require an individual to have a deviantART account in order to view your artwork. This will reduce the potential audience of people viewing your work and will prevent the work from broad exposure on the open web."

Do note, however, that for NEW uploads, the default selection for the buttons is for them to be ENABLED. If this is not your wish then you will have to remember to show the choices and make the desired changes before submitting your art.

Overall I think this new option is a distinct improvement - now we actually have the choice about whether to enable Share buttons on our work or not and can choose a specific option for each deviation. This is how it should have been implemented from the start, in my view. I'm surprised to see that viewing can now be restricted to DA members only, I wasn't expecting this but I do think there is a case for choosing this in some circumstances - no doubt many of you are aware of how much art ripping goes on, with outsiders taking our art images for uploading elsewhere. Enabling this option would limit who can see (and therefore steal) our art. For those of us not concerned about showing our art to the wider world I think this could be quite useful. I'm interested to know what people think about this - please leave a comment if you think this third option is a good idea or if (and why) you think it would be a bad idea to enable it!

The only downside is that these settings are only configurable on individual deviations, I can find no global setting option or a way of applying a particular choice to a number of selected images, so anyone wishing to actively enable these buttons for most or all of their deviations will have to do them one at a time. That will be a chore for those who have hundreds of artworks. If I have overlooked some control somewhere do please tell me...

Update, a few days later:
I've now discovered that there is a way of applying these settings to multiple images after all... check out the "Manage Deviations" page.


This time last year I won a DA competition and part of my prize was a nice pot of DA Dollars - I used some of this money to buy a DA Print account subscription. Well, you know what? Apart from me buying some of my own prints/calendars I haven't sold a single print in all the time that the Print sub has been active! I'm just glad I didn't waste my own money on paying for this sub, it's a total waste of time and money.

Needless to say I won't be renewing my Print subscription when it runs out in a few days!

Despite encouraging noises from some quarters and print requests every now and again (which seldom result in an actual purchase and thus only a waste of my time rendering and preparing a suitable print file) I think I may well withdraw from the Print scene altogether. I didn't come here to sell prints or make money anyway, I just dabble in my art for my own pleasure, mostly, and only offered a few prints because some people have said they wanted them and I thought I would give it a whirl. However, I've concluded that people don't join or visit DA to buy art.

Now, please don't think I'm whingeing and bleating about how "nobody ever buys my prints, wah, wah! "... I'm not. Far from it. I'm just being practical and realistic - even if I do sell a print or three over the course of a year (believe me, that would be a bumper year for sales, lol!) what good is the three or four dollars profit I'm likely to make from these? It's not enough to buy myself a print (the cost to buy and ship to the UK is outrageous!) or pay for even a short DA account subscription. It's not even worth transferring to my Paypal account... with currency conversion and other charges I would be left with practically nothing. The only winner in all this is DeviantArt, and as I've revised my opinion of them lately I've decided that I'm simply not going to contribute to their coffers any more. I will not support a company who has nothing but contempt for their users and paying customers. Their loss.

Oh well, I just had to get that off my chest, hehe.

Update, a few days later:
My worthless print sub has expired and I've now removed all my DA prints. The shop is closed and I have no plans to offer them again in future, at least not on DA. Thanks to those few individuals who did purchase my work.

Bye for now...


- Chris x x

Just a quick update after yesterday's journal about the massive art theft on desktopnexus.com (read about it here if you want to know the full story: [link])....

...I have discovered that two of the four images of mine that I reported just this afternoon have now been removed!!

This is the wording found on the pages where the uploads were:

<sub>Uh-oh! We couldn't find the wallpaper you requested!

This could be for a number of reasons:

- Incorrectly typed link (and wallpaper ID).
- Wallpaper removed for copyright infringement.
- Wallpaper removed for violating Desktop Nexus Terms and Conditions.
- Something broke.

Try searching (top right corner), or returning to the homepage and browsing from there.</sub>

So... I hope it's not a case of "something broke" but that this is some responsible action being taken at last!

Chris x x

This is just to alert my watchers to a wallpaper site that apparently has a lot of ripped art uploaded by users on it: DesktopNexus.com

I have already reported one of my images, uploaded by user JAVAJODI, so hopefully that will be removed by the admins shortly.

Within a short while I found images by a dozen more, mainly fractal artists whose work I immediately recognised - they have all been notified.

If you spot any artwork you recognise please notify the original artist so they can take action. This DMCA Copright Violation page gives instructions on who to contact, and how, to get violations removed.

Also note that this user is not the only ripper to upload artwork from DA for others to help themselves to for nothing - please check out *vulcania's journal for some other offenders: [link]

I'm sure I will find more rips... I will update this journal with what I find if I have time. For now I just wanted to bring this site to your attention, the more eyes we have on the case and by banding together the more effective we as artists can be in getting this stuff removed. The way I see it there's little point in getting angry or outraged by the scale of this, instead we need to systematically find and remove the stolen artwork through the appropriate channels and maybe, in doing so, get across the message that this behaviour is not acceptable.

Sorry to be bringing you bad news but I felt it necessary to spread the word.

- Chris x x