...with all the notes and comments I get here.

I'm tremendously grateful to all of you who use my art, and share your own, and I wish that there were 3 of me so that I could keep up with the comments. Unfortunately, there aren't. This morning my in-box contained 4,000+ messages and 2,000+ unread notes. If I had a broadband internet connection and keeping up with DA was my full-time job, I still couldn't do it.

Consequently, I've updated my stock usage rules (here: [link] ) to remove the part about leaving me a note; I won't be able to review and comment on every art-work. But if you leave a comment on an image, with a link to your work, others will be able to see it. I plan to periodically check and see what's going on, so I will still be +faving works and, of course, my stock crops up in all kinds of weird places on the site, all the time. So I'll still be watching you.

The bottom line, for me, is that doing this on DA has become a whole lot less fun. Between the idiotic "mature content" rules, the sheeplike attitude of the DA staff, and the inane self-congratulating babblings of the site's founders, I've pretty much lost interest in anything to do with the site except the artwork and artistic exchange. To me, that's a shame, because the web already exists as a perfectly good vehicle for that, and I don't need DA; DA's owners and administrators need to remember that the site needs good art and artists - not the other way around. Always remember that the people who have time to run around reporting art-works for "mature content violation" probably have that time because they're not creating anything worthwhile, themselves. For that matter, those who administer - have time to administer because they're not creating anything worthwhile with that time. Think about it. If that sounds like me being contemptuous and elitist - so be it.

What was really eating at me - and still is - was my inability to track everything you guys are/have been doing with my art. I was losing sleep. I was spending time reading my DA notes and +faving images, when I could have spent that time in my own studio, being creative. I was feeling guilty because I could not engage each and every one of you in the respectful, personal, dialogue that you deserve. But - ultimately - I can't. So I'm not going to try, anymore. It's nothing personal, it's just how I choose to spend the limited time that I have available - and I'm going to spend that on my art. I hope you understand.

I'll try to drop in at random in various places and say "hi" and I constantly stumble across art that uses my stock. So I'll be around. Now, stop reading this and get out there and create something beautiful.

mjr.

PS - my birthday is Nov 5. Do you think I'll break 2 million pageviews by then? I'll be 46. I never thought I'd make it past 40!

My latest piece of stock to get flagged as "mature" is this one:



(Edit: DA has reversed the "mature content" flag on the image. Thank you!!!)

Excuse me???

There are no buttocks in this image. Only fiberglass. There are no nipples, no pubes, no guns, no blood, no death, no pain, nothing but FIBERGLASS.

Except for the metal stand.

If you go to any major department store in almost any part of the world, you will find fiberglass mannequins like this. Sometimes they are wearing bikinis, sometimes lingerie, and - sometimes - if you happen to catch the staff setting up a new display - they are "naked" like this. And nobody freaks out because it is a FIBERGLASS DOLL.

Someone needs to go back and re-read the DA "mature content" rules. The rules read thusly:
Nudity-Fairly self explanatory. If your work contains nudity, displaying a penis, testicle, vagina, breast, nipples, or buttocks you should assign this tag.

GOT THAT? Apparently DA's own gutless admins haven't reviewed the FAQs. Let me read it to you again, in case you missed it:

Nudity-Fairly self explanatory. If your work contains nudity, displaying a penis, testicle, vagina, breast, nipples, or buttocks you should assign this tag.

Apparently "fairly self-explanatory" doesn't cover the kind of moronic fundamentalist screw-loose retarded bible-bangers who appear to be taking over this site. Someone on the DA staff needs to have the guts to tell these idiots "uh, no. THAT IS A FIBERGLASS MANNEQUIN YOU RETARD." As long as such stupidity is countenanced and hand-held we'll just have more and more of it.

Sexual Themes-References to sex or overt sexuality, including sexual based humor. This category may also cover images involving models in lingerie, provocative poses, and "skimpy" or erotic styles of dress.

It's a FIBERGLASS MANNEQUIN. If you consider this to be "sexual" you need to get to a doctor immediately because you've got serious plaster/sexual issues to resolve.

Violence/Gore-This refers to overtly bloody or violent imagery
...we can leave that off the table. HOWEVER I invite you to search "Crucifix" under deviations. What you'll get is loads of homoerotic torture art - only a relatively small percentage of which is marked "mature" in spite of the fact that it represents a barely-clad man being killed in a horrific manner. No, there's no hypocrisy here is there?? I challenge those of you who have been flagging my work as "mature" to spend your time where it's really going to help protect the kids from having their little brains warped with death-cult symbology.

Strong Language-Profanity, vulgarity, and otherwise coarse or offensive language.

Gosh, my caption suggests that the mannequin is named "Anne" - nope, no strong language there....

I support

mjr.

You may have noticed that I am now marking all my images as mature, ideologically sensitive, violent, toxic, infected, and otherwise unfit for anyone...

...who isn't a grown-up with enough sense to be able to decide what they want to look at.

I am utterly, totally, thorougly sick and tired of people who seem to think that the world should be free of anything that offends them. In case anyone hadn't noticed, it's impossible to live your life in this world without something annoying you; it's either going to be a jackhammer breaking cement at 7:00am, or chewing gum on a sidewalk, or a couple of pixels of nipple-JPEG on a thumbnail that you had to click and look at closely to verify that those might be nipple-pixels before clicking on the "report deviation" button.

So, I've decided that, from now on, my art is not available to anyone who isn't willing to say, right up front, "I'm willing to see gore, violence, ideologically sensitive, nude, etc" content. If you're willing to see that, you'll have your preferences set so that you can see my art. If you're not? One of two things:
1) too bad for you.
2) you're too young according to the stupid 18+ rules.

18+ is another topic I should not go into right now, but - simply put - it's really fucking stupid to not let an 17-year-old girl see pictures of a 20-year-old girl with her shirt off. Can we get real for just a second?

Anyone who is blocked by the age filter from seeing any of my photos, just email me and tell me what you wanted and I'll email it to you. If you're grown-up enough to email me and ask, you're grown-up enough to take a look at naked boobs. Period.

Why?

I've ranted about this topic before because stupidity in all its forms offends me deeply. What set me off this time is that some idiot complained that these two images:

are mature content. And some gutless DA drone went and sent me a "violation notice" and put a mature flag on them. Yes, a "violation" occurred - but it was only a violation of common sense. Anyone who is old enough to walk down a street in a big city, or go to a bookstore or magazine stand, or turn on a television - is going to see more "mature" content than is in those pictures.

In fact, Disney's(tm) Little Mermaid(tm) is showing more "thigh" than Sinned-Angel is in my oh-so-mature image of her. Reality check:

(avert your eyes!)

Yes, it's DA's rules and I am going to follow them scrupulously. As I said, from now on my images are all mature, violent, gory, ideologically sensitive images. I.e: they're only for cool people who can cope with the real world.

I need someone who's got a really cute little blue-eyed blond child they can lend me for a photo concept. I want to shoot a photo of a pair of proud parents gouging that child's eyes out with a spoon so that it can walk down the street safely without seeing anything "offensive."  Because, to me, the real offense is there - that people are willing to make weird intellectually inconsistent steps to "protect" someone from the real world. You're also protecting them from beauty, knowledge, elegance, and - in the long run, which is worse?

A couple weeks ago I mailed a package of porno magazines to a friend's 13-year old son. At the very least it'll save him having to shoplift a copy of Playboy, like I did when I was his age. I sent him two things: a couple copies of Perfect-10, and a couple of "men's adventure" magazines from the late 1950s. Guess which one was full of violent imagery, Nazi prison guards, gangsters, and ladies in their underwear? And guess which one was full of pretty ripe girls with bare boobs? Guess which one he liked better?  Hellloooo, america? This is a normal teen-ager we're talking about. Mask the "mature content" from him and feed him Arnold Schwartznegger movies instead of cheerfully bare boobs and maybe he'll want a machine-gun instead of a girlfriend. (the little voice in the back of my mind says: "why choose? I'll get 'em both!")

Anyway... I am thinking of starting a "get the chickenshits off the internet" campaign. Maybe if the folks who provide good content mark everything as all the mature content flags turned on, then all the cool people will look at it anyway and the idiots will be left with nothing but pictures of puppies and flowers and chubby little angels. Not mind you that I have anything against puppies, flowers, or pedophilic angel porn - being a person who's unafraid of any content, I see those, too.

I support

I am going to change my stock usage rules to read "you are not allowed to use any of this stock if you use the mature content filter." Because if you support this nonsense? My art is not for you. I am also going to create a deny list and if you're on it, you can't use my stock. If you do not support my position on this? You can't use my stock. My art is not for you.

Update:

I guess my journal entry must have pissed off one of the complainers 'cuz now I am getting more images re-tagged. Like this one:

Oh, yeah, that's violent and ideologically sensitive and - what-evurrrrrr....

And today's "violation report":

needs a mature content tag.  I guess I tweaked the prudes' noses and I'm in for a big spate of revenge taggings. People really make me want to puke, sometimes.

mjr.

Rules for how to use my stock

I am experiencing "death by success"

...Right now I have 615 notes in my in-box here. If I were to go someplace with high speed internet and sit there for 3 solid days, I could probably clear my in-box. By the time I'm done typing this, I'll probably be at 620 notes. And, because I don't respond fast enough, some of you (it's OK, I'm not complaining) note me over at my art account, or Email me directly.

I don't know what to do. I've removed the "please note me" part of my "how to use my stock" and I gave up long ago and stopped following the tags on my top page.

Anyhow, something's got to break. I can't make reviewing art-works my full time job and I don't want to stop posting stock. Besides, I'm at critical mass in that department - even if I stop posting stock, I'll still get buried. I love seeing all the stuff you guys are creating. But it's scary the way my in-box keeps filling every time I load my page...

Love you all,
mjr.

Rules for how to use my stock

I'll have had this stock account open for one year, on March 20.

...and I am nearly at the 1,000,000 page view mark. I'm not ASKING you to do anything to help me get there. I'll just post a bit more stock in the next couple of days and that'll do it.

(EDIT)
[link]
(thanks to who did the millionth hit and sent me the screenshot)
As I suspected, posting my secret stash of Carly nudes hammered my page-views over the top in under 24 hours. Thanks, Carly!

It's been an interesting year! I've greatly enjoyed posting stock and seeing the madness that you create with it. A few of my friends have pointed out to me that I'm crazy to just be giving this stuff away, but the way I see it: I get to participate in hundreds of people's art projects, and to be a part of the fuel of hundreds of people's creative engines... If that's not payment enough, I don't know what is.

As you can tell, working on stock has helped me creatively, because it gets me thinking outside my own box and about yours. It's no longer "what would I like to see?" it's "what would stimulate someone else?"    What I think I enjoy most is trying to come up with visual puzzles to confuse and amuse you. Like a pirate captain giving the camera the finger, or a ballerina with a samurai sword, etc. For example, today on Ebay I got an old-style Star Trek women's costume and a phaser and so forth. So I'll see if I can shoot some trek girl stock. Normally, I probably would have never thought of such a thing. But it'll feed into my own art because now I will have to think of something silly and sexy to do with a Star Trek costume. Ensign Neko-Mosume, anyone?

Anyway, I thank you sincerely for playing with me. Let's have some fun in the year to come, shall we?

Love you all,
mjr.

Feb 12, Belgrade

Sometimes I feel as if my inner mental landscape is getting cluttered: pirate wenches, harem dancers, witches, beautiful zombies, ninjas...

Wait
Did you say "ninjas"??  Yes, you read that correctly. My next offering is a bucket-load of new stuff including - gasp - the results of my first shoot with a male model. I managed to book a shoot with a local model, Josh P, who is a very athletic and scarily well-built young man with a good sense of play and a good sense of humor. Exactly the kind of person I need. And, he particularly liked my insane collection of prop weaponry. So, over the next week or two I am going to try to upload respectively sets of Josh as a ninja, barbarian warrior, buccaneer prince, gorean warrior, and duellist.

In the past year, several of you have asked me "why no male models?" and my answer has usually been "I dig girls."  But I have to admit that we had a good shoot and I got some great stock to share with you guys. Maybe I'll get inspired by this, and shoot more male stock in the future. No promises.

Contest Stuff
I haven't said anything more about contest stuff but here's what I am going to do. I'll make an official announcement about it when I get back from Europe, but the short and sweet is that I am going to have an ongoing award series called the Wow Factor Award (Thanks to for the name!)

Based on my experience with my mega-contest, the Wow Factor Award is going to be the exact opposite: a monthly set of prizes aimed at individual artworks that involve my stock, and which - well - have something about them that I particularly like. It's what I call "award sniping": you may just get a prize smacking you in the back of the head as you walk down the street. Well, maybe not literally, but I like the mental image.

I have been consulting with my inner circle of evil artist ninja buddies and one of my best DA buddies is working on a cool banner/logo. Expect more news in late March.

Till then, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and upload more stock! OK?

Love you all,
mjr.

When I started this contest, my reasoning was "why not?"

And, apparently, hundreds of you agreed with me!!! I'd like to thank you all - it's been an interesting experience running my first contest. The response was, to put it mildly, overwhelming.

Without further ado...
First Place
  Flying - by Cutteroz
Significant comment from judges: "Did I see this on a book cover someplace? It should be!"
and: "Flying" is innovative - daring like Dali, bizarre like Dali, too.
Cutteroz wins an iPod, Wacom Art Tablet, or iPod Touch; artist's choice. Congratulations!!!

Second Place
  Unhappy - by Stefano83
Judges say: "Unhappy" is a brilliant statement on body-image, and the light has been harshened up to emphasize it.  And it actually made me _feel_unhappy.  Great compositing on the TV image, too.
and: "!"
Stefano83 wins a year's subscription to Photoshop User/3d Creative or a comparable magazine of his choice.


Third Place
  Fata Morgana - by D-StruktIV
Judges say: Delicious use of light. Quirky!
D-StruktIV wins some custom stock images to his specification!

Runners-Up:
    
    

Runners up get a year's subscription to DA!!

I hope that you've all gotten something - even if it's only frustration - out of this contest. It has been a learning experience for many of you, I expect, and it has been for me, too. First off, I learned that I am not emotionally suited to judge from among lots of beautiful art-works. I'd rather sit back and be happily gobsmacked with wonderful things, than to try to rank them, sort them, or choose between them. Trying to pick ten out of more than one thousand art-works was crushing, upsetting, and - frankly - not a lot of fun. If I were made of money (I'm not) and had a spare $25,000 to give everyone an iPod, I probably would have done that, rather than to have to face the hard work of choosing amongst you. Perhaps you do not believe me when I say this, but I looked deeply at every single art-work that was entered, and I loved something every single one of them. You all have my deepest gratitude.

Some of your art-works made me jaw-drop at the crazy amount of effort you obviously put into them. Others made me laugh because they were clever or offbeat. And, then, there were the colors - the beautiful carefully chosen colors and textures that some of you worked with. Or, what about the out of the box ideas like the little sculpey statues, or the stick sculpture, or the absolutely insane 9-foot-tall painting? Trying to put all of those things on the same scale just makes no sense; I did it because that was what I said I was going to do - and I am very sorry if any of you feel slighted or passed over. The sad truth is that if I had thought things through a little bit more, I wouldn't have had this contest at all.

So, thank you all for supporting my first and only art contest!! I am, however, going to think up another way of saying "thank you" back to the many artists on DA who make me laugh or cry (or want to kick you!). I'll try to announce that in a couple months, after I have a chance to think the details through a little bit more carefully.

Until then, Please join me in thanking everyone who participated and a special round of applause for the winners and finalists.

Love you all,
mjr.

(PS - more ruminations on the problem of running a contest like this are here: [link] in my art account journal)

Ten Terrific Works!

Ladies, Gentlemen, and Others - here they are:

  Flying - by Cutteroz

  Universal Embrace - by Tearran

  just training dad - by hellron

  Unhappy - by Stefano83

  Fata Morgana - by D-StruktIV

  Mowing - by grunta-nz

  Lost Wonders of the World-1 - by Fangfingers

  Hands off the Chest - by heteroerectus

  The untitled scenes XCI - by funerium

  Cordula - by Jumprabbit

My Deepest Thanks
...to everyone who entered my contest. I hope you can imagine how hard it was to pick 10 finalists!!! There were over 1000 works of art entered, and I sorted through the entries and started copying and pasting every one that I remembered as being cool to my "cut list" - which ballooned to over 100 entries before I went through and ruthlessly edited it down, pass after pass. Let me tell you truth: it hurts me that I simply can't afford to give everyone a big prize. When you're sorting through a pile of brilliantly creative work that obviously took a tremendous amount of people's time - it's hard to be ruthless. I'm serious; it's upsetting.

Now, it's my judges' problem to decide on the winners. Judges are:
Delores (artist)
Bill (computer security guru and researcher)
Ron (manager of IT security at a biotech company)
Rachel (university professor)
Dan (computer consultant and vocalist)
None of them are involved with DA and we can all trust them to be unbiased. I'm expecting the final results to be in by mid next week.

This contest wound up being much much bigger than I expected it to be, and your response was amazing. I'd hug you all, if I could,
thank you so very much,
mjr.

THIS IS THE LAST SET

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That's ALL!!!!! Now I am going to make a couple passes through and weed out any duplicates that I see and start working on pulling the 10 finalists.

.... I will have all the remaining entries up by Sunday night!!!

...and then I'll be picking the finalists!!!

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Looks like we'll be close to or break 1000 entries on this contest...

.. I still have 3 pages of notes to go but I am getting a lot of
repeats. One thing that happened is some people were afraid
they wouldn't get listed and sent me 2 or 3 (or 5!) notes
asking "did you get my note?" which just made the problem
worse. Anyhow.. I'm sorting through it!

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I've got about 4 more pages of notes; no way I'm getting through them all tonight. But I'll try to have them done in the next couple of days. Then I'll start caucusing my judges!

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That's 30 pages at 30 entries per page... do the math... WOW!

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Still plugging away!

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Working backwards, I'm at Dec 15/14 now! 360 notes in my in-box... 286 contest-related.

...
I am aiming to try to have the first 10 images in front of the judges by Jan 2 or 3. It depends on whether I can work uninterrupted for a couple days... Holiday stuff...


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... I'm slowly working my way through the entries.

...going in reverse order (since DA loses which page I am on whenever I delete a note)  only 8 pages of notes to go! EEEEEEEE!

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... It's about time to stop doing this and head downstairs to make my Xmas feast... (Ham and garlic mashed potatoes!)

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Only 400 notes left in my in-box now!

..and I'm already starting to regret using Roman Numerals for the page titles.

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Sorry about the brief delay getting back to sorting these...

... Xmas holiday stuff has been interfering with my schedule. I'm going through all the entries that are in my Email inbox, first, then I'll go through the entries people sent to my "mjranum" id, and then I'll crunch away on the 454 notes in my in-box!!

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