Con Noooooogaaaaa!!!!

Heading down to Chattanooga this weekend for the one and only Con Nooga. Ever been to Con Nooga? No? Y'know we make fun of you when you're not there. If you don't want us laughing at you behind your back you might want to show up. It's gonna be cool. Lloyd Kaufman, Alex Del Monacco, Samantha Newark, Richard Green, Mark Helwig, Aradani Studios, Sean Taylor, Bobby Nash, Jason Crowe, Roni Jonah, Chris Goins, Richard Ewell, Shane Berryhill, Robert Freese, Deborah Collard, Tucky Williams, Kayla Perkins, ZP International, Christina Barber, oh and somebody called Larry Elmore. And those are just some of the people I know! Either I go to a lot of events or I'm way too social...Gotta be too many shows because I'm a bit of an anti-social prick! Anyway You gotta be there because I just got word that Abyss Walker author Shane Moore will be there and he won't let you live it down if you don't show up!

I'll have some new prints. I'll be doing some interesting panels on Saturday night. Been hearing about some parties as well. You should come.

Taking my own advice

I've decided to take my art down from some of my social networking sites, most notably Facebook and MySpace. The reason? I am losing control of how my art is being used. MySpace now gives the viewer an URL to the image so that it can be used by anybody, just like Photobucket! Every so often I do searches for my most popular images and I am now starting to see them pop up on Ebay and Zazzle stores on t-shirts and buttons. I am also seeing my images adorn websites and pages of people and organizations I really don't want to be associated with.

Another reason is that if someone were to complain about my images on a social networking site and said social networking site deemed my art inappropriate my account could be canceled. That would suck.

Another issue I will be addressing is hot-linking to my images, otherwise known as bandwidth theft. Hot-linking is to get the snippet of HTML code for one of images and stick it on your site which in effect makes your page look super cool at the expense of my bandwidth. This is bad for a couple reasons. 1) Again I have no control over how the image is used. 2) When I pay for my website hosting service I am allotted X amount of bandwidth. If I go over that amount I am charged or my site can be temporarily taken offline. When you hotlink to my images your visitors use my bandwidth. All it would take is some heavily trafficked website to hotlink to me and it could cost me a ton of money in bandwidth charges and missed income because my site is down.

Now, let's see if the guilty parties are paying attention. Over the next few weeks I will be systematically replacing my images with others. These other images may or may not be appropriate. Which means instead if the awesome Fannie the Flesheater image on your MySpace page you could wake up one morning to find some really disturbing pornographic image...and I mean some baaad stuff. Embarrassingly bad. Bad enough that it could get your account suspended. Or it could just be an image with a warning about hotlinking with my web address plastered on it. I haven't decided yet.

I know this sucks. But what I plan on doing is as I upload new art to my site I will post links on my Facebook and MySpace accounts. Maybe a blog post. Another idea I've been toying around with is starting an email list for updates on new art. We'll see.

Thanks .
Billy