Welcome to BearCat Media

Introduction

This site has been a long time in coming.  I took down my previous site around this time last year, May or June of 1999.  I was honestly surprised how many people inquired after it, and hoped I'd put something back up.  I rarely heard from anyone while I maintained the site, so I didn't expect many people would miss it.  I admit, it was flattering to find out people did.

This is sort of the fourth version of the site.  John Boulton, fellow Toronto furry artist (since fled to the swampy delights of Florida), introduced me to the basics of HMTL in February, 1997, at which point I put up my first, rather sloppy site.  In November that year, looking at fellow Toronto furry James Redekop's "Residents" site, I discovered tables, and the angels sang.  There was a way or order the elements on a page!  Glory, hallelujah!  So I created the second version of my site, the first "mature" one.  About the same time, I inaugurated WaterWings, which you can see elsewhere.  Roughly a year later, I overhauled the site, and the following spring, I took it down.

A lot of people wanted to know why I took it down.  It wasn't so much any event that prompted it as simply, I was sick of it, and didn't have the energy to change or replace it then.  The thing was stuffed with about a dozen different styles and themes.  It had art.  Stories.  Java gimmicks.  Photography.  Music.  Everything I could make that I could possibly boost up into cyberspace was there, and after a while, it just became a mess that had to haul down.  I believe I referred to it as "vomit on the wall" at the time.  That still sums it up pretty succinctly.

I'm hoping that this site will be leaner, simpler, easier to navigate, and pretty much just what people want from me.  I picked roughly 300 of my favourite images -- furry for the most part, but some of it just slick stuff I'm kind of proud of -- and I'm going to be putting up some of my writing.  Not much more than that.

I don't know how much new stuff there'll be.  From time to time there'll be some, I'm sure.  I'm hoping to update it about once a month now.  But big changes have happened in my life in the last three months; I'm now living on my own, in north-central Toronto, because for the first time in my life I have a job that pays a living wage (only took 32 years).  I'm a tech writer now (who knew a BA in English could actually get you a job?), but being a grown-up kind of eats into my drawing time.  So things will probably be slower than they were.  But, there will still be the occasional piece...

Anyway, blah blah blah blah blah.  I'll take this down in a month or two, once people have had a chance to read it, and put up something brief and appropriate.

Oh -- and I have my own domain name now!  Isn't that keen?  [Does little Homer-Simpson-in-The-Land-of-Chocolate Dance]  So very cool.

Stay naked.

Surprise, Surprise...

Well, I never thought I'd say this, but...

This page is best viewed in Internet Explorer 4.0 or later.

Yup.  FrontPage is letting me do a lot of things I want, and I'm having to dance all around the limitations in Netscape.  The background for this frame was just the background for this table until I realized that there's a bug in Netscape that causes nested tables to pick up the background image of their host table, in each cell.  If you're looking at this in Netscape, then the logo image in the top frame is surrounded by a gray border.  That's because Netscape refuses to acknowledge that I WANT NO BORDER IN THE FRAME and went to pains to set it that way.  So my carefully-honed effect is ruined.  Not to mention the watermark tag on this frame's background, which in IE, keeps the background (with the gradient fade at the top) stationary while the text is scrollable.  Netscape defeats just about everything nice I want to achieve with the layout of my site.

So, this page is best viewed in Internet Explorer.  That wasn't easy to say, but there it is.