Vervavim, biviēntés! (Or in RFM, "I'm back, folks!")
In the three months I've been away, renewed commitments towards the Adanson Jukebox have taken up so much of that time, I can't even process a comprehensive recap of that period anymore. Now, with KLPC's Reflections on hiatus till near the end of June, I've taken advantage of the available time between Volume 9 (June 4-11) and the first of several open-source-focused supplements by:
- taking care of some Tovasala/Relformaide-related matters, among them an overview of its new conjugation system (Bescherainaubré);
- winding down my 2021 New Year's movie marathon in as few selections as possible--half a year in!);
- and finally going ahead with this procyonine showcase here on Hive/Ecency, starting on Thursday night (June 24), after a 2-3-month holdup--long time coming. After which...it's back to business as usual (cabbages and kings and what-have-you).
You'll never believe it (even if you found me here for the first time), but this happens to double as this feed's ninth-anniversary post. (Aground began on June 25, 2012 on the late lamented Google+; continued on Steemit in February 2019 [two months before G+ closed its doors]; and moved over to its current Hive/Ecency home in April 2020.) Given the coincidence, it's no wonder today was high time for submission.
As for why I chose Nerday for this: There isn't a Furry community on this platform (and anthros to this day remain hard to find here; saying hi as always to 
Almost forgot to mention: The title's a meme snowclone. (I remember variations on that formula floating around G+ back then.) But don't expect Buzz or Woody here.
So, without further ado...on with the fan art, and a trio of special guests along the way. Or, the closest my feed has come to rivalling the pic-heavy notoriety of the Daily Mail.
Except for the copyrighted contributions by those guests (relayed here with their permission), all images below are CC0/Kopimi (Sam and Alfred) or in the U.S./Canadian public domain (Bobby Coon). Dates correspond to the addition of the item in this post.
24/6: First impressions count--but not today, buddy. From the very start of this post's development, I was reserving this sketch as the understated opener. Bruce Wayne has the Bat-Signal; the Dixwells' species has this, too. (I'll let someone here come up with their superhero idea.)
This was supposed to be Samson Dixwell himself--our Unspooled series' merchandising mascot--but ultimately seemed way different from his fur pattern. Taking what you get, then...
(Artwork: "bruv" by u/AnduRoman, 25/2/2021)
25/6: Straight out of the college sketchbook,⊙ our merchandising mascot as a refined black-and-white doodle--one that almost got overlooked while I was preparing this item. (This wouldn't look out of place in some Juno-style titles if our miniseries ever makes it to production--and it'll stay a miniseries because a single movie for each volume would still be too ambitious. [Recall Nippon Animation's Bannertail, which told the whole of the Ernest Thompson Seton squirrel's tale in 26 episodes; a bit more on that studio later.])
(Artwork: "Samson Dixwell the Raccoon" by u/13LuckyNumber, 18/3/2021. Tagged as NSFW over on Reddit for whatever reason.)
24/6: With that out of the way, things get better design-wise.
Different artists, different styles, same basic design concept. (And same adorable Sammy, as always.)
(Art by u/Gamecube43534 at r/ICanDrawThat [Imgur, 25/2/2021] and u/Batfur-142 [r/furry, 8/3/2021])
(All segments from this point on were added on June 25.)
You'll meet Sam again later--but for now, here's his cousin Alfred (from the same "Eleventy Gambit" excerpt of Unspooled #1 introducing him and solenodon sidekick Maurice last November). Or someone who somewhat resembles him; as I told this next collaborator back in mid-March, "[S]adly, this is not the finished version [of his design by "TheFuzzyBeast"] because it's locked up in my G+ Takeout archives till further notice. For now, I'd like to see you improve his fur pattern." (Because they had "a limited selection of markers" at the time, and Sam wasn't compatible with their palette.)
(Art by u/lebendige-kartoffel at r/DrawForMe [Imgur, 14/3/2021])
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And now, time for the guests.
Verbatim from our 2021 New Year's dispatch:
As for the Dixwells et al.: Raccoon cousins Sam and Alfred can actually relate to this variation on an urban-music meme; art by "RaccoonNik" on Twitter. A good while back, Inkbunny's "Fuf" and "Ceeb" introduced me (through a cub-based rendition I can't otherwise refer to here) to the fine art of "Drakeposting" (as stated by e9's tags).
This fur also goes by the Reddit handle of u/Nik159, and I happened to meet him (and one of his then-latest) on r/furry back in late January. That piece, entitled "Critter sounds", is in this month's package...
along with his most recent at press time, "Communication". (Submitted to r/furry after 7:40 this morning, while this post was being prepared. Several more to follow in an update this Saturday.)
One more guest for now; see you with the last one soon enough.
"Me whenever I see something amazing on this subreddit. (Which is always.)" (Art by u/Air_Ford, 1/2/2021; highly reminiscent of Sam's own character design--right down to the orange jacket!)
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From modern-day anthros...to turn-of-the-century stalwarts.
Meet Bobby Coon, one of the well-to-do inhabitants of the Green Forest that Thornton W. Burgess prided on writing of for decades (and Zuiyo Eizo, Nippon Animation's precursor, adapted into anime form in the mid-1970s for World Masterpiece Theatre). We'll just call him Bobby here because the surname (a reference to his species) just won't fly anymore post-Floyd.
Bobby starred in his own 1918 adventure, which this contributor recently picked up for a four-part Wikisource proofreading drive focusing on selected works of Burgess. This, and several other missions, came to a grinding halt once the Adanson Jukebox kicked back into high gear this April. (I'll explain that much in an edit summary on WS this weekend.) As I stated at the end of March's commentary on the new Tovasala Lord's Prayer at r/conlangs, I am yearning to give Burgess in RFM a chance--and now I finally have. (If only for the illustration byline and a couple of nearby paragraphs. Pardon if I'm a bit rusty on the rootstock; the old RFM wiki's gone, the backups are still bound for Archive.org, and I've been in the midst of a lexicon rebuild on GDrive for months now.)
In Tovasala Relformaidi--the present-day official name for my conlang--the line above translates to:
Oguilu, ńaigluvirat ulemstreave ńesil aulmoanile nend hendète tevigaurdi. (Pâgil3.)
From Chapter 3, "Bobby's Dreadful Fright", pp. 13-14:
| English | Relformaide |
|---|---|
| But something was happening now. There wasn't the smallest doubt about it. The great old tree shivered and shook with every blow. At last Bobby could stand it no longer. He just had to know what was happening, and what it all meant. With his teeth chattering with fright, he crawled up to his doorway and looked down. Badly frightened as he was, what he saw frightened him still more. It frightened him so that he let go his hold and tumbled down to his bed. Of course that didn't hurt him, because it was soft, and in a minute he was scrambling up to his doorway again. | Sed esengune hodiezat nouradu--ńond l'aubimausomi dubitaine. Aibũrgardeldile wulobat nend zigindat wob aivé gonti. Aulttemu, Bobby tolerabiŕaubelat haizé. Boulsabirujat hodiezeaj, nend porulaineaj. Ten sourupoaniles wulobanti ten foabarde, sliāuzat äffuind puerpronngoanile nend veyat ulemaupu. Molen foabardantirujat, veyat jesenie foabardat lumo shobrelausmu. Selbie foabasiemat jiēr pẽrdat guoftoanile nend ulemberloafat aup doamuboanile. Siduitu ńesane naŕdoalat lumio, ńẽrgim morbealbem, nend minelaprevu juostant äffuind puerpronngoanile relu. |
| "What shall I do? What can I do?" whimpered Bobby Coon as he looked down with frightened eyes. "I can't run and I can't stay. What can I do? What can I do?" | «Aiglirimmser? Aigabilimmser?» hupogat Bobby`iebo wob ulemaüvveyat ten foabardanti veyrupes. «Naŕvuernabilim nend naŕrestabilim. Aigabilimmser? Aigabilimmser?» |
Wait till this hits r/conlangs in a matter of days or weeks--complete with mandatory IPA and breakdown.
The RFM counterpart seen above bears proof to the conlang's synthetic (compounding/agglutinative) tendencies, as well as its morphological versatility. This specimen is among the first glimpses into its new conjugation system, whereby tense suffixes officially take the place of the old augments that typified the Referata era. While I relied solely on my best memory of the roots to translate most of it, there was some rust that forced me to coin/recoin/relearn the terms for "crawl", "grasp", "tumble", "scramble", and "whimper" thanks to Wiktionary and PanLinx, our old standbys--en route to adding them later on in my "Essential Roots" list on GDrive. (Said trouble spots are bolded for convenience.)
And yes, these are guillemets--the French quotation marks RFM adopted in its punctuation from the very beginning. (Dating back from the earliest draft in early 2009, even.)
Also, everything is rendered in the historical present tense--all because of a special trick used in the nation of Tovasala's writing/publishing trade: Adding a vertical "Pui", short for puilome (the past), at the very start of a story. (Tovasala's own map has yet to get off the ground; you'll get the hint in our parting shots.)
Not to mention RFM began as a side project to my other long-in-gestation book project, The Sevton Saga, for reasons that still elude me to this day. (Or, the one set in Rogatia.) Hopefully, once Unspooled's own kinks get worked out, I'll share you my own translation sample from Volume 1.
In keeping with today's topic: Tovasala refers to raccoons as sibandes, whose root is taken from Cree and Ojibwe. (What Western zoology refers to as "raccoon dogs"--a different species entirely--are called tanukines after the Japanese term for them.)
(Art by Harrison Cady, 1918)
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Penultimately, the best of the lot from the Dixwell queue of months earlier. (Either the opening word here is a nonce, or is so rare only Oxford and much older dictionaries have an entry--research pending. Either way, we've never come across it on Hive or anywhere else for that matter!)
"Last art request! I had some great practice trying to find my furry art style, I think I got it down. Gotta keep improving!" (Art by u/KanejjiKun, 25/3/2021)
Passable enough for me to adopt it as the official wiki logo and favicon for our creative-venture wiki when it returns in 1-3 days...on Miraheze. (Yes, you heard that right: We're giving in to what is essentially our last resort, barrier of entry and all.) To quote from the end of our Bescherainaubré post at r/conlangs, linked way up above:
Last October's ByetHost experiment ultimately went nowhere--I gave it my utmost all, but the upkeep funds weren't forthcoming, and my login credentials (although I typed in the right password when I tried venturing back weeks ago) eventually disappeared for lack of further activity, sorry to say. Thankfully, a good deal of our month-long trial luckily got backed up again--and all because of a namespace-allocation error I ultimately corrected within days; I didn't want anything wrong to happen.
...And while we're at it: We're finally considering ConWorkShop (CWS) as an alternative outlet as the bugs in our project get smoothed out.
That, and the fact that Referata's life support has been practically nonexistent since sometime early in April. About time I paged Yaron Koren again someday...
As stated before, everything from RFM to my geofiction efforts to the Adanson Jukebox logs will find a new home--redos or not. Right after press time, I'm signing up at MH Meta as I pitch my wiki over there. (Keep in mind Miraheze remains hesitant on introducing Semantic MediaWiki, Referata's selling point, over a variety of issues old and new--meaning The Next Best ThingTM, DPL--short for "DynamicPageList"--must do when we get to that.) Either that, or desperation has already set in by now.
Good thing Briarwood and their compilers are still taking a break for all of this, right?
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Last guest, last post--because in a few hours, I'll feel pretty much like this "Sleepy boi" (as depicted by u/No_Kaleidoscope8538, a.k.a. "galaxy_mints"; 13/2/2021). And how!
¤¤¤¤
And...that's it until such time as we meet again--and once more, I don't know how long the next gap will be. (As usual, the intermittent reblogs take effect in our absence.) Thanks, once again, for all those nine years (whether you first met me here or on G+).
In the weeks ahead, revisions of two posts from the recent archives; reruns from r/conlangs and the Takeout archives; tidbits on Reflections' first nine volumes; and everything in between. Also, stay tuned for uploads of the Dixwell fan works at Inkbunny, plus one from a Redditor/Twitter who left those sites some time ago for whatever reason--and (at long last!) a relay of the "Eleventy Gambit" over at r/furry_wordsmith this Saturday. Until then, this is your fellow Captain, signing off. Take care, stay safe and clean...and God bless.
Now, Nerday members...your turn to draw Sammy and Alfie! (If you've got any story suggestions, please drop me a line in the comments.) Any day from now, I'll implore those at RDT as well.
P.S.(A.) Still awaiting money for a new laptop through Patreon donations, anthro commissions, or otherwise. Care to contribute?
From the #MarigotNotebook on
⊙ Almost literally, according to the collaborator's thread title: "Stuck in class with nothing to do, got an hour and a half. Will draw anything the replies, but it will look terrible."
(3288/MN #414) (Effective this entry, the Kopimi link is now an IA snapshot, as the original domain sadly expired this northern spring.)