Chidi Okonkwo's Blog, page 14

APPARENTLY NO EXECUTIVE AT YAHOO UNDERSTOOD / RESEARCHED THE PURPOSE & USE OF TUMBLR, BEFORE SPENDING 1 BILLION DOLLARS ON IT!

So I've closed down my Tumblr art account.... and life goes on pleasantly. Plus I've got a ton of other stuff posted in this blog and on other accounts, and a lot of work to do for my next DSNG Chronicles ebook....

Yesterday I found an article from 2017, which talked about the Absolute Clusterfuck that took place at Yahoo, when their female CEO boldly bought Tumblr in 2013 for roughly 1.1 Billion dollars...
She even playfully said something in the press conference like: "Don't worry, we won't screw this up..."

BTW: I'm not going to mention her name, you can find out that stuff for yourself later. I'm using this blog to make an analytical point, and not to toss rocks at someone who may have actually done her best, in a position of authority...

Anyway, less than 2 years after the billion-dollar purchase, the Tumblr purchase was being considered as a complete tax write-off  & a failed investment.

The article that I read by Yuyu Chen shows a corporate perspective of what happened with the big purchase, while showing the thoughts of those top executives in Yahoo, versus the thoughts of those that worked in Tumblr.
Basically, none of the executives in Yahoo [in their late-40s and 50s] knew what the Tumblr users [from ages 15 to 35] were really all about.

In retrospect, the CEO of Yahoo really should have had a lengthy discussion with the founders of Tumblr, to see if they could generate a fully detailed year-long plan that showcased how they could monetize and generate Ad-revenue from their Website, after it was bought over.
Plus the Yahoo execs should have had their own corporately created detailed year-long plan about how Tumblr could be monetized, while showing that plan to the Tumblr folks, and getting feedback on the possible implementation strategy and the limitations in advance, before the buyout was done. Such plans should have been presented as guidelines of progress, which would be checked every 2 months, for the entire first year.

Instead, shortly after the big purchase was made [and there was little or no research by Yahoo on how to actually generate money from over 350 million young Tumblr users, mostly the millennials], then the lady CEO of Yahoo merely made a decree that she wanted to see at least 100 million dollars in Ad revenue sales-per-year coming from Tumblr, after a starting window of 2 years.

.....Holy Bogus Bullshit Batman.....

No one knew how the hell she came up with that huge projected profit figure... not even her. She had no plan for it, no strategy, and no advise for how the Tumblr site owners should do it. And neither did the Tumblr site admins have any idea of how to do it... after all, Tumblr had been around for roughly 9 years previously [it was founded in 2007], and it wasn't generating money. I believe a marketing firm was brought in to assist the Tumblr admins, and that didn't help at all.

Basically, she wanted to pull a big fat rabbit out of a big hat... but the hat didn't even exist. She would have known that, if the extensive research & investigations had been humbly done, perhaps for 4 to 6 months in advance of the purchase.

Eventually, the teenagers on Tumblr started seeing weird out-of-place Ads for "Retirement Benefits" in their user feeds.... and such Ads were promptly ignored.

The insightful article with more details by journalist Yuyu Chen is over here: https://digiday.com/marketing/tumblr-is-neglected-by-marketers/
Check it out when you've got like 3 minutes to spare....
Anyway, I'll keep you posted on the aftermath at Tumblr.- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

CUSTOM STAR WARS BLACK SERIES SNOWTROOPER BY DSNG [MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE]

A commission for someone cool.
This custom toy was based on the plain 6-inch scale Star Wars Snowtrooper, shown in the second row below. The base toy was completely white, and I had to take away the head and replace it with an Ironman head, before I started sculpting and painting the various parts.
The customized arm cannon on the left gauntlet is held via a magnet, as is the sniper rifle on the central backpack [which came with the toy, plain white]. Plus I added two axes from Marvel Legends Angela, and created the holsters for them on the sides of the backpack.
The shin-guards and boots were fully sculpted, along with their rugged white soles, the knee-pads, the skirt details, the mask, the chest armor, the shoulder-pads and gauntlets. He was spray-painted silver, before I added the greens and whites. The last pic is a "Fortnite skanky leg" dance move, which I hope Epic Games doesn't steal... LOL! Enjoy and share!

        
      - Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

FAREWELL TO MY TUMBLR ACCOUNT AND EXACTLY WHY....

This is a long rant, and I rarely do this. So just bare with me and hear what I've got to say. And if you want to comment at the end, do so on the DSNG Facebook Page, over HERE.

Guess I'll be leaving Tumblr today... it's been an extra art-dump site that I really don't use much. The "child porn controversy" a few months ago led to the Tumblr site owners and Yahoo management [who bought them out, back in 2013] to decide for a radical change: Remove all NSFW art / adult content / sexy furry art completely out of the site, via a Sweeper Bot Program that assess each piece of art on the site [more than 5 billion posts of art ] and randomly flags any pic as adult content [based on certain inaccurate code guidelines].

And once flagged, the pic will disappear from your feed, until you can successfully verify its clean nature. So random website visitors won't see that questionable art, since it will be censored, and maybe it will get deleted later by the site, I dunno...

But the Sweeper Bot / Computer Algorithm / System Sweeper program of Tumblr was never tested on a small scale to see and fix the bugs, before the site owners decided that they would roll it out, and fully implement it on the 17th of December 2018 [less than 3 weeks after the announcement]. The sweeper bot is already active and thousands of bloggers & fans have complained online. And amidst their site-wide outcry, a mass migration has started to occur, to other sites.


And I'm just not going to sit around and wait to see how this pans out. So I'll be deleted my tumblr... plus honestly, it's something that I considered doing earlier in the year, because despite the 529 posts that I've done and the fan base there of like 576 people, I rarely interact with most of them... But most fans there just look at my art, love it, download it as their new wallpaper on their phone / tablet, and then scroll on. That can't be helped, as people do whatever they want with the free art. And those fans who want paid art with specific designs are the ones that request the Commissions and they pay for it via Paypal.

Anyway, there's something else that I noticed. The lady CEO at the top of Yahoo, who gave the green-light for the purchase of Tumblr back in 2013, did so without fully knowing what the site was all about, or its true use & its delicate fan base.

Tumblr is a very "unique and delicate" site, like the Vines website was also very delicate, before it was shut down. And there are ways to make money from such sites, but only if you understand the mentalities of the main bloggers and their fans.
Because I've been one of them for a long time, I understand them.

[You may need to Click on the word link that says "Read More", below on the lower right, to see the rest of this article!]


But I'm not going to tell Yahoo Management how to make money with their owned delicate site. I've stopped giving Websites free consultations and free exclusive advice on how to improve their structure / upgrade their framework for making money or attracting more users.

I've got a story along those lines from Facebook that dates back to over 7 years, which I'll only tell you in person.... it taught me a hard lesson about giving idea s to website owners... Facebook was probably paying their consultants, fellow Harvard grads, over $100,000 annually. But I got nothing for an idea that I gave them, which they "twisted and implemented".... but that idea eventually came back to bite them in the ass last year, so it turned out to be funny.

Anyway back in 2013, Tumblr was bought for over 1 Billion dollars and yet was not profitable for Yahoo. And it didn't take-off as the "new Instagram-styled art viewing website" or the "new facebook alternative" that would invite Sponsors to come in like a tsunami flood. And I strongly suspect that the top-dogs at Tumblr and Yahoo now want to perform a rapid purge, and clean up the entire site, by taking out the porn. And then they'll probably rebrand it as something new in 2019, fresh and clean, for the major sponsors & advertisers to come and behold - so that the 550 million monthly visitors will finally be able to start being converted into a profit equivalent of $1 or more, per visitor.... that sort of thing.

But shiiiiit, it's not gonna work. LOL

Once the top bloggers start to leave Tumblr, their fans who are thirsty for more art and memes will leave with them, like a mass exodus.

Tumblr was once called the site for "Hippie porn and free ideas". And it was built upon the framework of people sharing uncensored pics with their friends, and reblogging the pics that they like, which may be fetish related. And the Sweeper Bot has already started tagging the pics of everyone on the entire site that they deem to be adult related.

There are roughly 450 million blogs on Tumblr as of December 7th 2018. And that number is sure to drop... because clean pics of the incredible Hulk [the shirtless green guy] and Garfield [the naked orange cat] have already been flagged all over the website, and they are being grouped as porn.
And users with 5,000 or more pics have to scroll through each if them individually to see if they were tagged as porn... which is a headache in itself.

I laughed real hard when I read some fan say that "Hulk's tittys were too big" and that's why he was being flagged as porn in various pics, all over Tumblr. Someone else that drew the cover of a children's book, with fully clothed characters, was tagged as porn.

A lot of my art pics were flagged as well [including the thicc / thick Jessica Rabbit and Majin Android 21 pics shown above, which were labeled as porn / violations].
Some of my numerous pics were nude art, and some were not. So I don't have time to debate with the site's admin.
I'm not the biggest supporter of X-rated art on the web. But I'm an artist. And when a fan Pays you to draw a Commission of Donald Duck banging the hell out of Mrs Incredible... then you laugh and do it, and let them enjoy their fetish.

Anyway, I know the backlash of Tumblr's abrupt change is destined to come from the offended fans & users, starting on December 17th 2018. And per the swiftness of the changes, it's probably been brewing  behind the scenes for over a year...

Therefore, I'll just close down my account on Tumblr and move on.

Sometimes Business owners / website owners do dumb things. It's almost like they've succeed for many years, without fully having any understanding of the mentalities behind those that pushed them to success by buying their products and supporting them.

In other instances, the business managers / site owners grow complacent and they relax; and they do dumb things amidst their relaxed state of satisfaction, due to the pride they've taken in their success. And they just loose touch with the reality of their fans... or the new director just doesn't understand the fans to begin with, or thoughts of greed step in and it makes the director initiate drastic changes - like introduce an untested Sweeper Bot after announcing it, within a span of less than 3 weeks notice.
Anyway, the folks at Yahoo and Tumblr will just have to they reap the consequences of what they've sown.

 I'll end by saying this: Thanks to all the fans that have supported my work on Tumblr, and a Bigger Thank You to everyone that has ever paid me for Commissioned art!!

And You can still catch The Art of DSNG on other sites!! –>
https://www.facebook.com/The-art-of-Dsng-166224470060382/ https://www.instagram.com/art_of_dsng/https://twitter.com/ArtofDSNGhttp://dsngsfm.blogspot.com/

Aaaannd, sometimes…..https://www.deviantart.com/dsnghttps://www.furaffinity.net/user/sfa/- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

CUSTOM BOMBSTRIKE TOY FROM G.I.JOE [ MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE ] BY DSNG!

Here's another new custom G.I.Joe gal: Bombstrike! This blond bombshell was ready 2 weeks ago, but I was just too busy to take the pics.
The base body was Marvel Legends Scream, with a lot of sculpt to transform her upper and lower body. The arms and head came from Mocking bird, with a new hair sculpt.
Her guns came from ebay and were customized. Her boots, vest, straps and costume were sculpted. Belt came from Casting Cave webstore. The scarf around her neck was from a piece of cloth which was painted. She was hand painted with Tamiya paints, plus she has four guns, held with a few magnets. I also added my custom Lady Jaye in some pics [Jaye's full gallery is in this site]. Enjoy and Share!

     

   

     

- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

DSNG CHRONICLES EBOOK COVER REMIXES! [BOOK 1, BOOK 2, BOOK 3, BOOK 4 AND BOOK 5!]

I recently touched up the classic covers of my first five DSNG Chronicles ebooks. The first sci fi ebook was published way back in 2010 via Amazon's kindle program. And there are currently 20 ebooks available for download on your tablet, PC or laptop. Amazon offer a FREE App that you an download to read the books on any of your devices. And all my books are shown over HERE!

Book 1 shows Prince Azzar, Kinera Foxx [golden assassin] and Wandah Konrad [a female Kataran].
Book 2 show Azzar and Chebeyah [a female Kataran].
Book 3 shows King Titron's face and Lady Neena Nekasha [a female Nauticon].
Book 4 shows Yatalia Yentoshima.
Book 5 shows an Alpha Senturi operative.

FYI:  These sci fi books are "Rated M" for Mature Audiences; since there is action, drama, romance and comedy... and sex. One of my fans called it "Game of Thrones in space".
Now I don't randomly kill off my characters like they do in that HBO show, but people are born and others die, in my sci if saga. But I believe in building a legacy for my original characters, without hitting the fans with some BS storyline. For instance, I won't kill my Wolverine or Nightcrawler, only to bring them back in 6 months when comic book sales are dwindling ;)

       

- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

CUSTOM ZANYA TOY FROM COBRA / G.I.JOE! MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE BY DSNG!

Another new Cobra operative from the Dreadnoks gang! Here is Zanya, the daughter of Zartan. She originally has green hair in the comics & toys, but I chose to remix her style; and I gave her black hair and a punk-rock style.

The base body was Marvel Legends Enchantress, while the head came from Elektra. The guns came from ebay and I sculpted her boots, her top, knee-pads, belt and her light armor pieces. She borrowed some gear from a TitanFall figure, including that dagger that pokes forth on her left hip. The skirt behind her was a piece of white cloth, which I painted black, before adding the lumberjack-styled hatched stripes. And I sculpted the baseball hat on her head. Yes she's thick, that's my chosen style ;)
Zanya has 3 guns and one dagger. She was hand-painted with Tamiya paints. The former group shot of the three main Dreadnoks is over Here! Enjoy and Share!

       

     

- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

CUSTOM WONDER WOMAN TOY WITH WARRIOR AMAZON ARMOR [MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE] BY DSNG!

Another new one... today it's a custom design of Wonder Woman!
I wanted a Warrior Amazon version of Diana / Wonder Woman, which radiated beauty and strength. She took a while, but I like how she turned out.
The base body was Marvel Legends Scream, which gave me a light base to work with. The head was from Enchantress and the lower legs were from Thundra. The hands came from Lady Thor.
The shield came from Captain America, while the spear was custom made, from the interior cartridge of an ink pen; and I just sculpted all the details for it. Her rear battle skirt came from a piece of cotton cloth, while the other blue skirts were sculpted. I had to hide her removable Spartan sword within her shield, since I didn't want it to clutter up the "armored side" of her costume. Plus her lasso was made from black bendy wire, which I repainted.

Her entire body armor and boots were sculpted as well. She was hand-painted with Tamiya paints.
Maybe I'll make her boyfriend later... we'll see ;) Anyway, remember to like and share!

     

       
          

- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

THE DREADNOKS - CUSTOM TOYS COBRA / G.I.JOE [MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE BY DSNG!]

All right guys, here are my three Cobra Deradnoks! Zartan is the elder brother, while Zarana and Zandar are twins. And I utilized custom designs for each of them, thus making them look like Techpunk warriors.
I've already presented full individual galleries along with descriptions of the base toy model that was used for each of them previously. Just follow the links below!
Zartan [hooded guy, with bow and arrows] Full gallery Here!
Zarana [hot chick, pink hair & body armor] Full Gallery Here!
And Zandar [red hair, blue armor] Full gallery Here!
Don't forget to like and share!

   

   




- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

CUSTOM ZANDAR TOY FROM COBRA / G.I.JOE! MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE BY DSNG!

Here is Zandar, one of the Dreadnoks! The Dreadnoks are a Biker Gang in the GI Joe universe and they serve as mercs for Cobra. Those that keep up with my customs know that I've already made his elder brother Zartan, and his twin sister Zarana. I strive to give them unique costume designs, tied to Sci fi / Techpunk themes. "Techpunk" is a term that a fan came up with several years ago on the Deviantart website, when they first saw my DSNG Art style and my original characters.

The base body was from WonderMan and the head came from Punisher. I sculpted the body armor, boots and gauntlets. And his hair was sculpted as well. The pics from the sculpting phase are shown at the very bottom of the gallery. His guns came from ebay. And his hacking swords were modified, from some Gundam gunpla parts. I added several magnets to his body, to yield magnetized storage for his guns.

He has a total of six guns and two hacking swords, plus one extra dagger held behind his belt. Plus there is an arm-cannon held on his left gauntlet via a magnet, so it's removable.After sculpting, Zandar was hand-painted and there's some dry brushing with black paint, which was added to his armor to give it that worn look. Enjoy and Share!

     

       

     






- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]

CUSTOM COMMANDER YATALIA TOY - URBAN WARFARE Ver1.0 [MARVEL LEGENDS SCALE] BY DSNG!

[image error] Yatalia Yentoshima is one of the original characters from the DSNG Sci Fi Series, which I created over 10 years ago. She is a member of The Top 5 Centura Elites [or the Top 6, if you've been keeping up with the Mature DSNG Sci Fi ebooks; hence you know what's been going on in recent times].

And Commander Yatalia is an elite Alpha Senturi super-soldier, just like Prince Azzar and Vince. And the three of them hail from Planet Avera.

For those that are new to this franchise, The Alpha Senturis are gifted espionage soldiers, trained in lethal assault tactics and a host of hand-to-hand combat techniques. They have phenomenal powers and excel in CQB scenarios; but they are not immortals. Hence they need sleek combat armor.

And in my ebooks, the term "gifted" is synonymous with "super". And when you follow the hyperlinked words above, the links will take you to the past blog articles with colored posters of characters like Yatalia and Azzar [he's the main protagonist in the DSNG Sci Fi Series].

This 6-inch toy shows one of the Urban Warfare costumes that I came up with for Yatalia a while ago. I may make some more versions in the future, we'll see how it goes... plus I enjoy giving her heeled boots, which I sculpted. Yatalia has extremely powerful legs, and she's got a big butt, so baby got back.... yes, my custom toy gals are thick / thicc; and it fits with the concept art.

The base body for this Yatalia custom toy was Marvel Legends Enchantress. And the hand and arms came from Lady Thor and Thundra. The head came from Demolition man / Scourge, plus I had to re-sculpt the visor and some other small parts of the helmet. And her weapons were from ebay. She has a total of three guns and just one sword, holstered on her back.
Her ponytail, her left hip's handgun and her sword's holster are all held in position via small magnets. I sculpted all of her costume features and her heeled boots. And she was hand-painted with Tamiya paints.
Remember to Enjoy and Share! BTW, I've written roughly 20 DSNG Sci fi eBooks and you can check out one of the latest ebooks over HERE! And Amazon lets you read the First 5 Chapters for free! Just click on the ebook's cover in the link! :)

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- Article written by the artist & author of the DSNG Sci Fi Series
[http://dsngsfm.blogspot.com]